Kucherov gets booed heavily in Toronto for tough NHL All-Star Skills performance

There wasn’t an official vote, but don’t expect Nikita Kucherov to be named the most popular NHL All-Star of the weekend.

Competing on Friday night at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena at the NHL All-Star Skills competition, Kucherov was one of 12 players competing in the annual event.

But Kucherov, the winner of two Stanley Cups and the 2019 NHL Hart and Art Ross Trophies, didn’t exactly have the best performance on the evening in his four events — and the  Toronto fans let him hear it.

The boo birds came out a few times on the evening, and were loudest when Kucherov finished dead last — ninth place  — putting up a time of 44.178 in the stickhandling challenge, nearly 20 seconds behind Connor McDavid, who won the event with a time of 25.755 seconds.

Kucherov also put up five points in the passing challenge, which placed him, you guessed it, dead last out of those 11 competitors, some 20 points behind Vancouver’s event-winning forward, Elias Pettersson.

Perhaps there’s still a bit of bad blood from the two previous playoff series between Toronto and Tampa Bay in 2022 and 2023, where the Lightning eliminated the Leafs from the playoffs before the fortunes were reversed a year later.

But given what appeared to be, well, not the best overall effort from Kucherov, the reaction on social media wasn’t exactly a whole lot kinder to him.

Kucherov fared a little better in his final event of the evening, hitting the four targets in the accuracy challenge at a time of 16.460, again won by McDavid.

But it still wasn’t enough for him to get through on the evening, finishing with a grand total of just 0.5 points on evening, and in dead last place overall, getting his only points for his tied-for-fifth-place performance in the one-time challenge.