Florida provides NHL chance to try different events at All-Star Skills

SUNRISE, Fla. -- Aleksander Barkov sat on the bench, looking over the ice as if it were the beach.

The captain of the Florida Panthers wasn't dressed in his hockey gear at the end of the 2023 NHL All-Star Skills presented by DraftKings Sportsbook at FLA Live Arena on Friday night.

He was dressed in lifeguard gear -- red hat, red hoodie, red shorts. Instead of skates, he wore slides.

"I can swim," he said with a smile, "but that's about it."

Barkov had been part of a gag in the Great Clips NHL Breakaway Challenge.

Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk and Ottawa Senators forward Brady Tkachuk wore floppy hats, flowery shirts and short shorts as if the brothers were hanging out at the beach.

With a towel around his neck and a cooler by his side, Brady Tkachuk relaxed in beach chair with a beverage. Barkov stood guard. Miami Dolphins defensive end Christian Wilkins stopped by too in a Panthers jersey.

They watched as Matthew Tkachuk juggled the puck down the ice, stuffed it in his floppy hat and fired it past former Panthers goalie Roberto Luongo, who had a pool noodle for a goalie stick. Luongo looked like he could not have stopped a beach ball.

"I loved to be a part of that," Barkov said. "Of course, it's always going to be on YouTube, so you can always see it."

Whenever the NHL holds an event, it pays tribute to the local market in creative ways.

Ahead of the 2023 Honda NHL All-Star Game at FLA Live Arena on Saturday (3 p.m. ET; ABC, ESPN+, CBC, SN, TVAS), the League took risks and tried new things with a South Florida flavor for the Skills competition -- from the golf course to the beach to the arena.

NHL.com was there to take you behind the scenes:

The golf course

After holding outdoor Skills events for the first time in Las Vegas last season -- one in the Fountains of Bellagio, another on Las Vegas Boulevard -- the League came up with two more outdoor events this season.

The first was the Chipotle NHL Pitch 'n Puck, a hybrid of golf and hockey.

"Golf is perfect for Florida," NHL chief content officer Steve Mayer said. "Our guys love to play golf. So, why not?"

Sure. But how do you make a game out of it? How do you execute it when you have about an hour to tape footage that will be shown on ESPN and the screens in the arena?

"It's really important to try to get it right, because we have one chance to get it right," Mayer said. "If this didn't work, it's a disaster. You can fix certain things in an edit. Not everything."

The NHL Player Safety department helps with the Skills competition on the side each year. George Parros, the senior vice president of Player Safety and a former NHL forward, lives on a golf course and experimented with sticks and pucks on grass as the League developed the event.

The NHL chose the No. 9 hole at the Plantation Preserve Golf Course and Club in Plantation, Florida, a par-4 with an island green.

The idea was that players would wear hockey gloves and tee off using hockey sticks and white pucks, laying up short of the water. Then they would try to shoot the pucks over the water and onto the green. Finally, still wearing their hockey gloves and using their hockey sticks, they would putt golf balls. Everyone would get a mulligan. The fewest strokes would win. If players tied, the winner would be the one with the longest drive.

One question was how to protect the course while making it practical to shoot pucks on grass. The NHL made patches of artificial ice to place on the grass as a shooting surface. The League experimented with covering the green with artificial ice, but the pucks bounced off too easily, so it covered the green with artificial turf instead.

Another question was how far to set the tee box. Former NHL forward Shawn Thornton and former NHL defenseman Keith Yandle tested different distances last week. The NHL settled on 81 yards to the water and 140 yards to the pin.

"We did not want them to go for [the green] in one," Mayer said. "We wanted them to lay up. That was going to be the fun of it. We wanted them to hit it into the water."
Columbus Blue Jackets forward Johnny Gaudreau, Arizona Coyotes forward Clayton Keller, Dallas Stars forward Jason Robertson and Montreal Canadiens forward Nick Suzuki filmed the event Wednesday afternoon.

It was 82 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny. There was a small gallery of fans and a special visitor: Corey Conners, the top-ranked Canadian on the PGA Tour, who grew up playing hockey in Listowel, Ontario.

"Huge hockey fan," Conners said. "I have a ton of respect for what these guys do and how good they are."

Each player got five practice tee shots. Robertson wound up and fired a slapper into the water, and the puck skipped across the surface like a stone as the fans cheered.

Then the crowd hushed as if this were The Masters.

Each player laid up with his tee shot as expected, but that was the easy part.

"The second shot was definitely kind of scary, because it was into the wind a little bit," Suzuki said. "With the water, you didn't really know how to touch it in there."

Everyone carried the water and made the green in two strokes.

Turns out, the hard part was putting. Robertson, Gaudreau and Keller each had to take his mulligan before taking what counted as his third stroke. Suzuki had the advantage of watching the others try different techniques -- choking up and putting their hands together, spreading their hands apart like Happy Gilmore -- and of knowing he had his mulligan in his back pocket. He sank his first attempt for birdie and the win.

"I honestly thought my putt was a little too far left, but then it just broke in," Suzuki said.

The crowd cheered, and Suzuki waved with his hockey glove.

"[It was] a pretty unique challenge, and it looked very, very difficult," Conners said. "But these guys are All-Stars, so they made it look really easy. I certainly would have had a tough time getting the puck over the water. … I'm not sure I could offer them too many great tips, because they were pretty impressive with the hockey stick."

The guys asked Conners for golf tips afterward, then played five holes with him.

"He was 4-under," Suzuki said. "I think I was plus-2 or -3. Not bad for me."

The beach

The NHL thought about using a dunk tank on the ice at the Skills competition in St. Louis in 2020. Mayer said there were controversial figures in and around hockey the League thought people might want to see dunked. Call it the NHL's version of a dunk contest.

The idea was shelved, but it resurfaced when the NHL brainstormed for South Florida. It would go perfectly outdoors with the sun, water and sand. The only question was how to make it different from the Honda NHL Accuracy Shooting in the arena.

The NHL put the Enterprise NHL Splash Shot in the middle of the 2023 Truly Hard Seltzer NHL All-Star Beach Festival, an event full of activities for fans right on the sand of Fort Lauderdale Beach Park.

The League built a small synthetic rink surrounded by stands. Along one side, with the Atlantic Ocean in the background, two lifeguard benches sat above dunk tanks that were 5 feet deep.

"Listen," Mayer said with a smile, "I have to admit I'm not sure everybody knew when they got here how deep the tanks were."

Flanking each dunk tank was an NHL logo and six foam surfboards, which were designed to fall backward when struck by pucks.

The idea was that the players would wear hockey gloves, use hockey sticks and shoot hockey pucks. They'd hit each of the six surfboards, then hit the NHL logo to dunk their opponents. Four pairs would compete in a preliminary round to see who could do it the fastest, and two would face off in the final.

Once again, the NHL was taking a risk.

"If this is a rainy week, this is a disaster," Mayer said. "But it was worth the risk, and it's worth being outside."

It paid off. It was 80 degrees and sunny, and the stands were jammed with about 1,600 fans in everything from hockey jerseys to swimsuits when the players filmed the event Thursday afternoon wearing T-shirts, shorts and swimsuits themselves.

Pittsburgh Penguins center Sidney Crosby paired with Colorado Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon, his close friend from the same hometown of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. Mayer said it was Crosby's idea.

New York Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin paired with his teammate, defenseman Adam Fox. Mayer said Shesterkin wanted to do it even though he was a goalie.

Avalanche forward Mikko Rantanen and defenseman Cale Makar teamed up as Stanley Cup champions, and the Tkachuk brothers teamed up too.

On the golf course, the NHL put pucks in buckets from the driving range. On the beach, it put pucks in pails that kids normally use to build sandcastles.

First, Fox dunked Matthew Tkachuk in 26 seconds, which meant Brady Tkachuk had that amount of time to dunk Shesterkin before an air horn blew. He failed to do it, but Shesterkin jumped into the dunk tank, anyway.

Next, Rantanen dunked Crosby in 25 seconds. MacKinnon failed to dunk Makar in time, but like Shesterkin, Makar jumped into the tank, anyway too.

Not everything went according to plan.

The surfboards on the right side didn't fall as easily as the ones on the left, probably because the breeze off the water held them up. (The dunk tanks might have blocked the breeze on the left.)

In the final, Makar went first on the right, but because of the issue with the surfboards, the NHL decided to have him redo it on the left. The fans watching on ESPN and in the arena would be none the wiser, and the visuals were everything the NHL could have wanted.

"We made some adjustments," Mayer said. "… The beauty of editing makes me feel that this is going to look amazing on television. It'll look fantastic."

Makar ended up dunking Fox in 18 seconds on the left side. Barefoot, with no gloves, using a goalie stick, Shesterkin failed to dunk Rantanen in time. He hit five surfboards before the air horn sounded. That meant Rantanen and Makar were the winners.

The crowd wanted to see Rantanen hit the water, though.

"Dunk him!" the fans chanted.

Shesterkin knocked down the last board and hit the NHL logo, and Rantanen celebrated with a splash.

"It was fun," Makar said. "It was unique. We were all getting laughs out of it, so as long as the fans were happy, we're happy."

It was imperfect, yet perfectly fine.

"Overall, what I loved more than anything, the guys just loved it -- loved it," Mayer said. "… They were so cool, so into it. Their personalities, they were just trash-talking. Sidney Crosby goes in the dunk tank and laughs about it? Like, those are things that we don't normally see. For all those reasons, [it was a] complete success, and it was just a lot of fun."

The arena

Washington Capitals forward Alex Ovechkin and his 4-year-old son, Sergei, stole the show Friday night when Sergei scored a goal on Luongo assisted by Ovechkin and Crosby. Boston Bruins forward David Pastrnak made a memorable moment by impersonating Happy Gilmore.

But the Breakaway Challenge began and ended with South Florida.

Before Barkov and the Tkachuks pretended they were at the beach, Toronto Maple Leafs forward Mitch Marner played a role out of the TV show "Miami Vice."

He wore sunglasses and a white linen suit instead of his hockey gear, and his skates were white and pink instead of black. The intention was to let Luongo, the local fan favorite who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame on Nov. 14, play the hero.

Once again, not everything went according to plan.

The lights were low. Marner couldn't see well through his sunglasses and stick-handled too far.

"Well, obviously we talked about it earlier," Luongo said with a laugh. "I knew what he was going to do. We kind of messed up the drill. He was supposed to shoot from a little bit farther out. I was supposed to make a big glove save. But he got a little too tight, so I just tried to get a glove on it. It was too close for me to showboat it."
Oh, well.

"The shot didn't work as well as we wanted it to," Marner said. "But it was a lot of fun."

That was the point.

"I keep on saying this, but I love when these guys smile," Mayer said. "They've got such personalities. They so enjoy the game. They're all about celebrating the NHL, and this is the night that we can showcase the best of the best doing some really fun things."