Versus needs some competition

The 2008-09 All Star Skills competition was on last night. The stars put on a decent show. The television broadcast? No so much.

Just to recognize a few of the nice things they did, here are the highlights from my perspective:

• The interview with Geno was nice. Kudos to Malkin for stepping up to the mic when it had to be tough for him.
• The camera angles that they had were decent, and when they managed to capture the event, it didn't look bad.
• Someone was psychic in putting a microphone on Marc Savard, who made the finals of the elimination shootout contest. He was entertaining, and it was fortunate he made it to the finals, or he would have left the ice as everyone else did when they missed.

Now the bad:

• How many attempts did we flat out miss because they were show a replay, or worse yet, showing a player on the bench WHILE THE EVENT WAS GOING ON??? I've never witnessed such poor production work on a professional event.
• Even when they had the event covered live, the camera they used was the wrong one. I'm thinking specifically of Patrick Kane's trick shot where he used the handle of the stick instead of the blade. It would have been nice to have a good angle of him doing that, instead of a view from ice level, where you couldn't really tell what he was doing.
• When the announcers were talking about the flex in the stick blade on the hardest shot competition, wouldn't it have been nice to have a slow motion replay that actually showed the thing slowly enough to see the stick flex? CBS has those nice super slow motion cameras for the NFL. I'm sure they're expensive. I don't care. Buy one and use it. Hockey happens so fast that slowing it down on replay can only increase the appreciation among the casual fans.
• When you're showing the Young Stars game, and there is a developing 2-on-1, DON'T CUT AWAY. They did this a few times, and it was really frustrating to watch. I know that game is all offense, but we want to see guys perform some fancy passing and shooting, not an interview with Jay Boumeester (seriously - he really didn't seem to want to talk, because no one is that bad on an interview intentionally).

I think that's enough bashing for today.

Was the trick shot competition a bit of a letdown to anyone else? Some of the guys pulled off really sick moves (Getzalf especially). Some others (Ovechkin) were a letdown. Using the props were cute, but why use two sticks if you're not going to really do anything with them? Not much skill and a bunch of show that wasn't all that exciting.

I'd say let's hope the All Star Game today will make up for it, but I seriously doubt that it will.