How Connor McDavid helped fix the NHL skills competition: Garage drills, star buy-in and a $1-million prize

The 2023 All-Star skills competition, a disjointed, dispiriting flop of an event in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was still fresh in Gary Bettman’s mind when he traveled to Edmonton late last February. Fresh enough that the NHL commissioner made a point of pulling aside Connor McDavid for a chat.

Bettman wanted to know what the league’s most skilled player thought could be done to fix the competition.

“He was all-in to help and participate,” Bettman told The Athletic.

The meeting led to a dialogue between the league and its top star that would stretch over several months and multiple sitdowns. McDavid would help come up with stakes to make the competition matter, ideas for skill displays from the drills he did growing up, and even help sell the event to other top players to make it a true best-on-best event.

The result of all this will be on display on Friday night at Scotiabank Arena, when McDavid and 11 other players take center stage for the most anticipated event at this year’s All-Star weekend in Toronto.

It is not a stretch to say they are being tasked with saving the skills competition.

The event has been sliding toward irrelevance in recent years, with half-hearted participation (at best) from the players and an evolving series of complicated challenges that didn’t resonate with the audience. And then it quite frankly jumped the shark last February in Fort Lauderdale, with pretaped segments that saw players firing pucks on a golf course and triggering dunk tanks on the beach.

Senior league officials knew as they watched at Amerant Bank Arena that the concept was broken.

“When we left Florida we thought, ‘All right, it’s time,”‘ Steve Mayer, the NHL’s chief content officer, told The Athletic.

They were getting players to come to the competition, but the big question, Mayer said, was, “Did they really want to be there?”

The fact that Bettman was directly involved in the resulting discussions shows how seriously the NHL’s head office was taking the need for change.

Brainstorming began almost immediately after last year’s All-Star weekend on how the NHL could revamp the competition and reengage the performers. The league picked the brains of everyone from Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan to McDavid.

“I was excited about it,” McDavid told The Athletic. “I think the previous skills competitions were going a little gimmicky, a little out there, but I’m excited that it’s going to be normal skills that we would use on the ice. I think that’s ultimately we want — to come here and show off our skills and put on a good show for the fans.”

Ultimately, everyone involved decided they needed an end game: one winner of the competition. From there, they came to the idea of a limited-field competition with a $1 million prize.

That required league officials to get comfortable with the idea that they would be leaving more than a dozen All-Stars on the sidelines watching the chosen 12 competitors go through a series of challenges along with everyone else.

It also required buy-in from the game’s top stars, because you couldn’t credibly try to identify the ultimate skill player without the likes of McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Nathan MacKinnon, Nikita Kucherov, Auston Matthews and David Pastrnak being willing to participate.

That group accounts for the past seven Art Ross Trophy winners, past five Hart Trophy winners and past four Rocket Richard Trophy winners.

They’re all entered in Friday’s skills competition field, along with two of the game’s top defensemen — Cale Makar and Quinn Hughes — plus William Nylander, Elias Pettersson, J.T. Miller and Mat Barzal.

Perhaps the best example of how deeply the new concept has captured the imaginations of NHL players is the fact that Barzal was disappointed to be left out of the original lineup. He back-channeled his desire to participate and got rewarded with a call this week when Jack Hughes had to withdraw because of an injury.

Barzal downplayed his campaign to get in, telling The Athletic, “I was asked if I wanted to do it if someone dropped out, and you’re not going to turn that down.”

As with All-Star events in every professional sport, the challenge is to find the right line to where participants can have fun and still tap into their competitive nature. Offering a meaningful prize pot should up the stakes considerably. For comparison, MLB’s home run derby champion gets $1 million while the entrants in the NBA’s dunk contest compete for $100,000. And limiting the field to the league’s elite should introduce an element of bragging rights.

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The NHL invested a considerable amount of time in the revamp.

After receiving the initial sign-off from McDavid on a winner-take-all concept, the league honed in on how best to identify that player. Simple, straightforward events were prioritized. In conversations with Mayer, McDavid shared some of the drills he did back home in his garage while growing up, offering a level of input well beyond anything Mayer said he’s previously received from a player in his seven years on the job.

In September, those two men spent an hour together in a conference room at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, with Mayer presenting a detailed deck outlining the scoring system and eight events that would be used to identify the winner.

‘”I’m not kidding you when I tell you if Connor McDavid said, ‘This is the stupidest thing,’ and, ‘Why are you doing this?’ we would have scrapped it,” Mayer said. “His endorsement made us feel like, ‘OK, we’ve got something here.’”

But McDavid was in. And he’d help make sure other players were, too.

“He helped explain it, I think, to other players,” Mayer said. “‘Hey, this is why it’s cool.’ … Players knew what was going on because I think he was going around telling people.”

The concept should produce some drama. And nerves for the participants.

“Definitely. I think if you’re not nervous a little bit for this thing, you’re a bit crazy,” Barzal said. “With a million bucks on the line, I think you’re going to see some guys giving it pretty good go. I’m excited. I think the events this year give everybody a chance to show off. From a viewer’s perspective, we’re kind of showing off everything. I think they did a really good job. That’s my honest opinion.”

“There’s always a little bit of nerves,” McDavid agreed. “You just don’t want to embarrass yourself. … But I think the competitive juices will get going once we start.

“I think fans are excited about it. I mean I’ve had people reaching out to me telling me they’re excited. I hope the players like it. I hope the players can have some fun with it and make it competitive.

“You want to have a good showing, ultimately. You want to show off your skills. That’s ultimately what we’re here to do.”

Every participant chooses which four of the first six events he’ll enter: fastest skater, hardest shot, one-timers, passing challenge, stickhandling and accuracy shooting. Points are awarded to the top five in each event, with the aggregate scores used to narrow the field to eight.

The final eight players then choose which goalie they’ll face in the one-on-one challenge, in which they take shots for a minute from six designated positions, with the top six left after that event advancing to the obstacle course final.

You could conceivably have three Canucks or two Oilers or two Maple Leafs, among them. And it’s guaranteed that at least a few of the NHL’s biggest names will be left competing for the $1 million prize at the end.

“Listen, you can never predict what’s going to happen on Friday night, but I feel like it’s going to be good,” said Mayer. “I can’t see where it’s going to go awry. It’s easy to understand, it’s fast and the guys are going to be into it.

“And, let’s face it, we’re trying to build stars. There’s no better way to do that than having 12 of your greatest players all out there together in one place, at one time, competing.”

(Top photo of Connor McDavid at the 2023 skills competition: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)