The NHL’s redesigned All-Star Skills Competition brought a $1 million prize and renewed excitement to one of the league’s tentpole events of the year. But you wouldn’t have known all that watching Nikita Kucherov.
The NHL’s redesigned All-Star Skills Competition brought a $1 million prize and renewed excitement to one of the league’s tentpole events of the year.
But you wouldn’t have known all that watching Nikita Kucherov.
In the rebranded event, which had just 12 competitors, the Lightning superstar was eliminated from the competition after just six mini-games.
Kucherov, 30, finished in the middle of the pack in the one-timer challenge, but it was his next time up in the passing challenge where things went poorly — and the Scotiabank Center crowd in Toronto let him hear it.
As he skated down the ice in the event, even the ESPN broadcast noticed Kucherov wasn’t close to pushing things near his full speed and didn’t seem to be trying to hit the passing targets in any meaningful way.
