The National Hockey League (NHL) will present its All-Star festivities this upcoming weekend in Toronto, Ontario from Scotiabank Arena, presenting a new facet of coverage through its Thursday broadcast. The first day of the event will include an All-Star player draft, reinstating the selection process and implementing celebrity captains as well.
Players who will serve as captains for the four teams include Toronto Maple Leafs forward Auston Matthews, Edmonton Oilers forward Connor McDavid, Colorado Avalanche forward Nathan MacKinnon and New Jersey Devils forward Jack Hughes. Following the All-Star draft on Thursday night, the league will hold a special ceremony honoring the 1967 Stanley Cup champion Toronto Maple Leafs followed by a 3-on-3 showcase featuring the best of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL).
Last year’s broadcast of All-Star weekend experienced gains across the board, averaging 1.3 million total viewers across its slate of events. For the All-Star Game itself, viewership peaked at 1.9 million viewers, averaging 1.5 million viewers with 549,000 in the persons 18-49 demographic. Moreover, viewership for games broadcast on ESPN/ABC and TNT as of numbers compiled by Sports Business Journal last week, averaging 487,000 viewers on the aforementioned networks. As the NHL prepares for another All-Star Weekend, broadcasting events across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN+ in the United States, it hopes to be able to build off that momentum.
“We’re really hopeful this is not only going to be a positive weekend for the NHL in-arena, but outside the arena and on television,” NHL Chief Content Officer Steve Mayer said. “We have great partners both in the United States and in Canada, and they lean into All-Star Weekend like no other event. They bring a lot of their on-camera talent; they build sets; they broadcast from the arena [and] they broadcast from Toronto. It’s a big deal, and we think we’ve given them some new formats that are exciting.”
The All-Star Draft in particular will serve as an opportunity for the league to highlight some of the personalities of its players. Combined with celebrity participation and various technological advances, the draft will help set the tone for the weekend. Outside of the on-ice events themselves, the weekend aims to be a celebration of the sport with a fanfest, community events and other key activations. Viewers consuming the game from afar will notice new technology and the utilization of the league’s EDGE puck and player tracking statistics, specifically during the skills competition.
Bringing back the All-Star draft was an idea that came through discussions within the league considering that the game was returning to Toronto. Current Maple Leafs team president Brendan Shanahan came up with the idea when it first began in the 2010-11 iteration, and it has produced many memorable moments over the years. Some of the storylines that came out of the event pertaining to who and where certain players went created compelling conversation for the broadcast.
The National Basketball Association is taking the opposite approach for its All-Star Game this year, returning to the traditional East vs. West format. After holding a draft featuring two team captains behind closed doors, the league started televising the action on TNT and eventually held it live at last year’s game. Conversely, the NHL will be returning to the concept and implementing it within its tournament-style layout of the All-Star Game on Saturday afternoon.
“It’s good TV,” Mayer said. “It’s a lot of fun, [and] it’s going to be fast. We’re going to do the whole draft in an hour, but that will determine Saturday’s matchups. The more we talk about it, the more we planned it [and] the more we’ve formatted it, I think it’s going to be really fun.”
The draft itself will be broadcast at 6 p.m. EST on ESPN2 and ESPN+ as part of the new All-Star Thursday festivities. On Friday night at 7 p.m. EST, the league’s skills competition will take place on ESPN and ESPN+ with a lineup to be announced. The weekend concludes on Saturday, Feb. 3 with the NHL All-Star Game at 3 p.m. EST on ABC and ESPN+.
