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This weekend you have a few options for watching professional sports. Sure you can watch some NBA games and get lost in copious amounts of fouls in a league lacking parity. The games still mean something for a lot of teams and it’s a valid solution for your sports-watching needs, but there are some other shows in the weekend lineup.

The NFL Pro-Bowl and NHL All-Star games fall on the same weekend this year. Some would say these two events are equally messy and pointless. I see this as an area the NHL gains ground on the football juggernaut.

There isn’t much meaning to either of these events, other than having some fun and offering the fans a chance to see each leagues’ best players join up in a “fantasy draft” type scenario. Well that is, the NHL’s best players while the NFL has what amounts to a league-wide optional practice. I think this speaks volumes about the culture of the two leagues. The NFL can’t even get their players to take a free trip to Hawaii to have some fun on the field. Sure it doesn’t help that they scheduled the game the weekend before the Super Bowl, eliminating players from the best two teams in the league right off the bat.

The NHL, however mandates that players must be at the All-Star game. Why force players to show up to a meaningless game? It’s about the fans, not some opportunity to make money. The same reason why the players joining the festivities are up to a fan vote. Maybe that gets a bad result from time to time with a player getting voted in like John Scott, a now minor leaguer who has five career NHL goals. But that has made for a story line of intrigue leading up to the game. The only story line the NFL has is the record number of invites because they have to keep replacing players that dropout. Some exclusive club.

There is a dual meaning to the NHL’s agenda. One half is for die-hard fans to see their favorite players in a more lighthearted casual affair of skills competitions and a new three on three format game. The other half is to show off the league’s talent to those just checking it out, maybe even for the first time.

The moral of the story is that both games aren’t meaningless. They present their respective sports’ usual entertainment value in a different package to attract old and new fans alike. Too much pressure is put on them otherwise when they should be relaxing and fun scrimmages that have no implications.

Sure, more people will be tuning into the NFL as their cult of fans will buy into anything they produce. But the NHL has it right. If you are going to do something, do it well or don’t do it at all. From now on, when I see how many times a hockey player was an All-Star, it’ll mean an awful lot more to me than how many times a football player has been a Pro-Bowler.

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