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2016 NHL All-Star Skills Competition Recap: East Beats West 29-12

Posted on by Jonathan Garcia

This year’s Skills Competition had a bit of everything. Tons of boos for Patrick Kane. Lots of ovations for John Scott. It had hockey creativity, props, and general zaniness. Exactly what you’d expect at an event like this.

A sold out crowd packed Bridgestone Arena, which was decked out in All-Star garb, and it was just a delight to see.

The Eastern Conference bested the Western Conference 29-12, and therefore got to choose which teams would play first in tomorrow’s All-Star Game. The East elected to go first, so that Jaromir Jagr can get home sooner if they lose. Classic.

Quick Recap

Fastest Skater: Dylan Larkin with 12.894 seconds.

Breakaway Challenge: #NHLBreakawaySubban

Accuracy Shooting: John Tavares

Skills Challenge Relay: The West

Hardest Shot: Shea Weber (duh)

Shootout: The East

Winner: The East

Of course, there was so much more to the game than that.

Mascot Game

While the swarm of hockey fans were still filing into Bridgestone Arena, the 26 NHL mascots were busy facing off against one another.

The score was tied by whatever made up time frame the professional huggers were playing by, so a shootout finished it off. Hometown hero and repelling feline Gnash scored the game winner because of course.

START THE FESTIVITIES

OUCH! LET’S TRY THAT AGAIN

Much better.

Yes.

Fastest Skater

There were try hards in this event, but ultimately the Red Wings‘ rookie Dylan Larkin ran away (ha) with the event. Not only did he have the fastest time of all the skaters, but he broke Mike Gartner’s 20-year-old record for fastest lap around the perimeter of the rink.

Breakaway Challenge

Props, hats, wigs, masks, little kids. Over the years this event has lots all semblance of hockey and instead turned into what type of stuff can the players pull out from the wardrobe department. You know what, we got Little Burns out of it this year so that should be considered a win.

Too bad for Little Burns that PK was voted the winner. Montreal typical.

Accuracy Shooting and Skills Relay

These events suck. The relay seems like it should be way more fun than it actually is, but did provide us some time to marvel at Evgeny Kuznetzov and Nicklas Backstrom’s passing.

Corey Perry, Drew Doughty, and Patrick Kane all messed up pretty bad as well. Always fun.

Hardest Shot

Maybe someone can dethrone Shea Weber this year.

Ha. As if. There were some pretenders who showed up, but it took several shots for anyone to even break 100 mph.

That would be the winner, but the crowd was not content with what they saw. They wanted Weber to break the record, and belted an uproarious “one more shot” chant. The Captain obliged.

Wow.

Shootout

You get enough shootouts during the regular season, but there is one in particular that stood out.

Those are some nifty moves by a player that never gets a chance to show them. He wasn’t the last shooter to go, but it was certainly a nice cap on was was a fun evening leading up to the All-Star Game.

Until tomorrow.

Talking Points