Shoot the puck

Overpassing hampered first two periods of All-Star Game

LOS ANGELES -- Because the score was close, people are probably going to mistakenly think it was a great game and I just didn't see it that way. In fact, I thought the game was a little bit boring for the first 40 minutes.

I'm sure the league will say it was close and hotly contested, but there weren't many scoring chances early on. Down the stretch the guys did kind of up the ante a little bit offensively. After totaling 53 shots on goal in the first two periods, the teams opened it up and fired 36 shots in the third. The guys seemed to be kind of polite in the early-going and you could tell they were conscious of not having another 14-12 game like last year. But it wasn't that they were playing great defense, they were just passing up too many shots. Everyone was trying to make the extra pass, so a lot of exciting plays just kind of got derailed on their own with the extra cross-ice pass.

As for the best players on the ice today at each position, I thought Vincent Damphousse was the best forward, though his San Jose teammate Teemu Selanne seemed to have the puck an awful lot for the World team, as well.

I believe that Patrick Roy played with the most intensity and sent another message that Canada made a mistake in not naming him to its original eight on its Olympic roster. Roy played with the most intensity of anybody on the ice. He started against Dominik Hasek and you could see that he wanted to play tough early on. Roy pushed somebody out of his crease and just looked very focused. He's always very focused, but he just looked like he wanted to send a message that he should be playing in the Olympics and that there was no way he was going to have a bad 20 minutes.

Also, Nikolai Khabibulin showed that Russia is to be taken seriously in a few weeks in the Olympics. Eric Daze may have been voted the MVP just a tad too early. Daze had a good game -- he battled for his goals, he did everything right -- but his team lost. Khabibulin pitched a shutout in the third leading the World team to a victory. A little bit of a black eye perhaps that Khabibulin didn't win the MVP, but it's all for fun and it was good for Daze as a first-timer here as an All-Star.

Tomas Kaberle was the best defenseman on the ice. I thought he stood out since he had the puck a lot and jumped up into the rush smartly, not just any time he wanted to. He seemed to read the plays the best and be in the mix the most.

I didn't think you could really disappoint in an All-Star Game, but Jaromir Jagr continues to be invisible. Something is not right there. We know that when he is at the top of his game, Jagr should never appear to be missing. We've heard about his groin trouble; mentally, he's had stuff to deal with, but he's seemed happy and OK with everything when he went to Washington in the summer. As recently as two years ago, he was the most dominant one-on-one player in the game, bar none, and you can't say that now.

As for Jagr's controversial comments during the game, I just think he's misunderstood that way. Jagr thinks he's being funny and that's a cutup for him. He's just trying to be personable. A comment like that is just him thinking he's funny.

I don't believe Jeremy Roenick was trying to send any kind of message with his first-period hit on Alexei Zhitnik. Roenick told me during Friday's news conference that he was going to throw a bodycheck in the game. I asked Roenick yesterday, "How do you prepare for a game like this? Because when you are at your best, there is a physcial element to your game." Roenick said to me: "Well, guess what? I'm going to throw the first bodycheck of the game tomorrow, guaranteed." And then he went out and hit Zhitnik today in the first.

That was the only check anybody threw all game, but he carried through on the promise that he made to me yesterday at the news conference. I think he was just messing around with what he said yesterday because the rest of the day he just fell into line and was making pond-hockey moves. It wasn't like he played at a high intensity level.

Roenick is the kind of guy that plays to that audience in a news conference, though I think he also plans to deliver when he says stuff like that. I think it was a pretty square hit and it drew one of the loudest cheers of the game. Zhitnik didn't know it was coming, and the fans were certainly taken off guard by it. But the hit received one of the loudest ovations of the entire afternoon, showing that it's hard to play good hockey without checking being a component of the game.

Both teams tried out some line combinations we could see in Salt Lake City. On the game-winning goal, Markus Naslund was paired with centerman Mats Sundin. So a little foreshadowing for Team Sweden. Team Canada had some of their possible Olympic lines intact here. But also there was a defensive pairing for Team USA that we could see, with Chris Chelios skating with Brian Leetch. So I think both coaches took the opportunity to play some countrymen with one another.

Darren Eliot, a former NHL goaltender, is a hockey analyst for CNN/Sports Illustrated and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.

 

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