Make it count - Hockey's Four Nations Face-off shows how All-Star breaks could be

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”
– Albert Einstein (theoretically)

Much like the much-used quote about great art, “I know it when I see it”, human beings have an amazing bullshit detector for when things matter, and when they don’t. It’s why middle school talent shows are not as breathlessly raved about as the finale of the Voice. It’s also why the middle of the season for a show like the Voice is also less-watched than that finale. People tune in when the stakes are highest, and otherwise have a plethora of other entertainment options.

The same is true for professional sports, who often find the middle of their seasons filled with dog days of drudgery. Games 90-100 are often the least-attended in a 162-game MLB season, a marker that often hits around 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through a year.

Unsurprisingly, the attitude of the players seems to be the real harbinger for how the fans will respond. If the fans are pretty sure the players don’t care, then they are off to be distracted by whatever this world is telling them is the more interesting thing.

Take the crowds at the NBA All-Star game as an example. While there was still a modicum of cheering for contests like the Skills Challenges, there were moments during the game you weren’t sure if the crowd was still in attendance. During the three hours it took to play thirty minutes of completely meaningless basketball, emcee/court jester Kevin Hart tried repeatedly to grab a cheer from the crowd. The noise in return was tepid at best, and when the cameras rarely cut to the stands, they showed more people staring at a phone screen than the stars they’d come to witness.

The league’s efforts to change the game for the better fell pretty flat, and reviews and ratings bore that out. The players didn’t care, the fans didn’t care, and the league needs to go back to the drawing board. Perennial All-Star Kevin Durant went so far as to suggest the league might be better off just cancelling the whole thing and giving the players a break. Ho hum.

Meanwhile, across the aisle…

The NHL’s All-Star replacement contest, the Four Nations Face-Off, has been a surprising and resounding success. The games have been competitive and challenging, and have produced one of the most-watched and most-talked about midseason breaks in recent memory. To a person, fans and critics are saying the same thing.

They care. They are not only itching to play, but to play their best hockey. Their national pride and reputations are on the line. While everyone points to the three-fights-in-nine-seconds start of USA-Canada in the round robins, each of the games was competitive as hell, with players going all out. And the overtime-blessed finale, won by Canada and their magnificent stars (including Nathan MacKinnon, the player of the tournament), was a remarkable finish to a torrid and hard-fought week.

The ratings between the two were no contest, either. When hockey outpoints hoops on the Nielsen score, they have REALLY figured something out. The NBA teams could not have been much less invested (save Victor Wembanyama). The NHL teams were so invested, that pride was put aside. Stars took their turns. Hell, injuries were sustained.

And that’s the trick most of these All-Star contests is trying to avoid, right? Losing a league’s stars in a contest that same league deems meaningless to the season’s outcome is a conundrum that is admittedly tough to crack. But ask those hockey players if playing for their country in a best-on-best is meaningless, especially when they’ve been shut out of Olympics play for years.

The NHL efforts already give you the answer. They cared enough to lay it all on the line, and the results bore that out, both in the quality of the product, and in the interest it generated. It’s rare that the NHL is the league showing the rest how to operate, but they certainly gave everyone else a huge clue as to how to get the viewers back.

Bottom line, in any of these contests, if it doesn’t matter to the players, it doesn’t matter to whoever’s watching… no matter how charming Kevin Hart attempts to be. Give the athletes a reason to care, or go with KD’s option number two, and give them a gold star and a week to heal at home. This in-between stuff with no meaning is exactly that… Meaningless. Just doesn’t count. But as the Four Nations have shown, give us all a reason to care, and we’ll be there in droves, and with dollars. The only way to make us care is to make it count.