NHL All-Stars

We've reached the midway point of the NHL's abbreviated 2021 season.  As strange as it's been, I have to say it's working.  The All-Canadian division was done out of necessity, but it was brilliant!  We all thought the East would be the toughest division, and that has proven to be the case.  The Central, meanwhile, has three of the top five teams in the league, one of which won't even have home ice in the first round of the playoffs!

Ordinarily when the season hits halfway, we start thinking about the All-Star Game.  More specifically, which players will make it.  Not this year!  With the late start and the condensed schedule (plus that whole still not being able to cross the border thing), the NHL decided not to have an All-Star Game this season.  And, unlike the NBA, which unnecessarily held one after originally saying they wouldn't, the NHL has held firm on that stace.

However, just because there won't be an All-Star Game this season (or, probably, next season), doesn't mean we can't still have that fun!  So what if it's purely ceremonial!  These guys are having All-Star caliber seasons.

For the sake of this exercise, I built my teams as if the All-Star format was the same as last season.  There's no reason to think it would be any different.  The divisions don't have the same names or the same teams, but there are still four of them, so the three-on-three tournament with semifinals and a final.  And each team had an 11-man roster, so that's what I'm going with.

I didn't choose a captain for each division, though.  The captains would typically be the only player chosen by the fans, but, there's no way of knowing how that vote would've turned out.  So, for the sake of ease, I didn't try to guess and just went with the 11 best players.  Is it possible that some of them would've been voted in as captains anyway?  Probably.  But it's also just as likely that the captain would be someone random and not really deserving, thus taking a spot away from somebody else.

And, yes, I am following the rule that every team needs to be represented.  That's not as easy as it sounds, either.  Because it means that good teams with multiple deserving players are limited to two, maybe three, All-Stars.  It also means that you've got to find somebody from the bad teams.  Fortunately, all of the bad teams have somebody worthwhile.

The fact that pretty much every division is incredibly top-heavy proved to be very helpful, too.  Toronto is clearly the best team in the North.  As such, the Leafs end up with three All-Stars.  And, since the North has one fewer team, I didn't have to choose between Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl as Edmonton's representative.  I can take them both!

Likewise, out West, Vegas, Colorado and St. Louis (why is St. Louis in the West instead of Dallas again?) are clearly a cut above the remaining teams in the division.  Anze Kopitar has a pretty good case for inclusion, but the Kings as a team don't deserve two.  And, since I needed a defenseman, Drew Doughty gets the nod over him.

In the Central, things were both tricker and easier because of the three dominant teams.  Tampa Bay, Florida and Carolina all had plenty of candidates.  Narrowing it down was the hard part.  Even though Vasilevskiy and Hedman were locks for the Lightning, I found it very hard to ignore Palat's numbers.  As a result, the Hurricanes, despite their success over the first half of the season, only get one All-Star.

It was just as hard in the East, which is the most balanced of all the divisions.  What I did with the East was take the goalies out and consider them separately.  I filled eight of the nine skaters with one player from each team, and, since the Capitals have both the highest-scoring forward and highest-scoring defenseman in the division, they get the extra spot.  Then I turned to the goalies, where Tuukka Rask and Semyon Varlamov turned out to be easy choices.

EAST
G: Tuukka Rask (BOS), Semyon Varlamov (NYI)
D: Rasmus Dahlin (BUF), Ty Smith (NJ), John Carlson (WSH)
F: Brad Marchand (BOS), Mathew Barzal (NYI), Artemi Panarin (NYR), James Van Riemsdyk (PHI), Sidney Crosby (PIT), Nicklas Backstrom (WSH)

CENTRAL
G: Sergei Bobrovsky (FLA), Andrei Vasilevskiy (TB)
D: Seth Jones (CBJ), Filip Hronek (DET), Victor Hedman (TB)
F: Vincent Trochek (CAR), Patrick Kane (CHI), Joe Pavelski (DAL), Aleksander Barkov (FLA), Filip Forsberg (NSH), Ondrej Palat (TB)

NORTH
G: Fredrik Andersen (TOR), Connor Hellebuyck (WPG)
D: Tyson Barrie (EDM), Jeff Petry (MTL), Thomas Chabot (OTT)
F: Johnny Gaudreau (CGY), Leon Draisaitl (EDM), Connor McDavid (EDM), Mitchell Marner (TOR), Auston Matthews (TOR), Brock Boeser (VAN)

WEST
G: Philipp Grubauer (COL), Marc-Andre Fleury (VGK)
D: Cam Fowler (ANA), Drew Doughty (LA), Torey Krug (STL)
F: Conor Garland (ARZ), Mikko Rantanen (COL), Kiriil Kaprizov (MIN), Evander Kane (SJ), David Perron (STL), Mark Stone (VGK)

Next comes the challenge of determining the semifinal matchups.  The NHL normally does the lazy thing and has the Atlantic play the Met, while the Central plays the Pacific (I'm assuming to guarantee an East vs. West final).  They wouldn't have been able to do that this year, though, since they specifically said there are no "conferences" and the Stanley Cup semifinal matchups will be based on points.  So that plan is out.

Instead, I'd go with the format they used in 2017, when they kept score during the Skills Competition, and the winning division got to pick its opponent and which game it wanted to play in.  Just like there's no way of knowing who the captains of a fictional All-Star Tournament would be, there's no way of knowing who'd win a fictional Skills Competition.  But I just have a feeling it would be the North.  So I'm saying the North wins the Skills Competition and chooses to play the West (the weakest team) in the first period of the All-Star Game.