Screen Shots: NHL Skills Competition, Pittsburgh Penguins, Hockey Alberta and HEROS

Adam Proteau discusses the new NHL All-Star Skills competition format, Kyle Dubas taking the blame for the Penguins' depth issues and a pilot project that brings street hockey to First Nations communities.

This is Screen Shots, a regular THN.com feature in which we tackle a few different hockey topics and analyze each of them in a few paragraphs. Let’s get straight to it:

The NHL’s freshly announced changes to its All-Star Skills event are a good thing. 

Giving the winner of the eight-stage competition a cool $1 million is exactly what’s necessary to get elite players invested in the all-star process. It doesn’t matter if the 12 players involved in this new format are the top earners in the NHL, either. They now have the chance to add a whole lot of zeros to their bank account, and that’s the proper motivation that won’t lead to injuries, as it would if the All-Star Game itself was more competitive.

We know that just doesn’t happen in All-Star Games – you can’t arbitrarily ratchet up the energy of a mid-season game that has no impact on a team’s playoff hopes. You must find a way to work around that reality, and that’s what the league has done here. 

Yes, there are only going to be 12 players involved in the skills event, but that shouldn’t be an issue with marketing the game. Focusing on the dozen guys who do get the chance to compete for the big money and promoting their personalities is the challenge for the league, and it should be able to do that.

Ultimately, money talks, and the chance for players to show off their talent while tapping into their competitive nature is a savvy move by the league. We can see this newly rejigged skills event structure lasting many years, as there really isn’t a better idea than the one the NHL is going with this year. A million bucks is no small chunk of change, and players now will have more than enough motivation to show off their talents for a few hours over the all-star weekend.

The Pittsburgh Penguins continue to struggle, going 3-4-3 in their last 10 games. Penguins GM-president of hockey ops Kyle Dubas made comments about the team’s depth issues falling on him. That's nice to say, but it changes nothing about Pittsburgh’s predicament.

Dubas basically made over the entire bottom two lines and much of the defense corps. He can't do the same thing during the season, so it's hard to see a happy ending for them now. 

The longer the season goes on, the more it feels like this is another huge waste of Sidney Crosby’s and Evgeni Malkin’s talents. 

As per PuckPedia, the Penguins have only $1.2 million in salary cap space to work with, hardly enough money to have Dubas go out and make big moves before the league’s March 8 trade deadline. And there aren’t going to be many teams interested in dealing for the likes of Jeff Carter (three goals, four points in 21 games), Lars Eller (three goals, eight points in 27 games) or Vinnie Hinostroza (one goal, three points in 11 games).

Dubas’ decision to acquire defenseman Erik Karlsson isn’t the reason the Penguins are suffering, but there’s no question that devoting $10 million in cap space to Karlsson has limited their depth for the rest of the roster. Dubas is making a public attempt to own that choice, but the reality is the Pens don’t have the depth to be a Metropolitan Division front-runner, let alone a true Stanley Cup contender. And no matter what Dubas says, there’s no quick fix that’ll turn their season around.

Finally, here’s a tip of the cap to Hockey Alberta, which is taking considerable steps with the Hockey Education Reaching Out Society (HEROS) and the First Nations Health Consortium of Alberta in helping fund hockey initiatives in Canada’s First Nations communities.

The three groups partnered to bring NHL Street programming to 10 First Nations communities this year. It’s a pilot project with the goal of delivering community-benefiting joy, physical activity and support for developing life skills to young people in these First Nations communities. 

That’s exactly what should be happening if we’re going to grow the sport and create positive life experiences for young people through hockey. Here’s hoping for initiatives like this to take place for more underrepresented communities.