57th National Hockey League All-Star Game
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| Date | January 25, 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Arena | Bell Centre | |||||||||||||||||||||
| City | Montreal, Quebec | |||||||||||||||||||||
| MVP | Alexei Kovalev | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 21,273 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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The 57th National Hockey League All-Star Game was held at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, home of the Montreal Canadiens, in conjunction with the Montreal Canadiens centennial celebrations on Sunday evening, January 25, 2009. The game was held between two teams, each representing a conference (Eastern and Western) of the National Hockey League (NHL). The Eastern Conference team won the game 12–11, decided by shootout. The next NHL All-Star Game, the 58th, was held in 2011 in Raleigh, North Carolina, instead of 2010, due to the 2010 Winter Olympics, which were held in Vancouver, an NHL city.
The game was part of a weekend of activities. On Saturday, a game featuring NHL rookies and sophomores preceded a skills competition among the NHL players, called the NHL All-Star Game SuperSkills Competition. In a first for the All-Star Game, the "Breakaway Challenge," a part of the skills competition, had fans voting for the winner using their mobile phones, with the real-time voting results posted on the NHL's website. The game was preceded by a circus arts display and a concert was held between the second and third periods.
Unlike previous years, the Skills Competition did not have players playing on the behalf of their respective conferences (thus, there was no conference-based scoring) and the team-based Obstacle Course was removed. In addition, YoungStars players became eligible to play in the Fastest Skater, Hardest Shot, Shooting Accuracy, and Breakaway Challenge events.
In reaction to the changed format for the skills competition the year before, the Fastest Skater event reverted to the traditional one-lap format. The breakaway challenge used Jason Maggio, a local minor hockey goaltender defending the goal (to answer criticisms that the all-star goaltenders simply poke-checked the players as they were making the shot) as well as the player being able to take as many shots as possible in one minute (instead of only one shot). Finally, instead of being a judged competition, the breakaway challenge allowed the public to vote for the winner via text messaging. The public chose Alexander Ovechkin, whose highlight was a shot using two sticks while wearing a series of props provided by Evgeni Malkin, by a landslide, with 47% of the votes. Malkin won the shooting accuracy over Dany Heatley in a sudden death shoot-off after both scored 4-for-4 in the preliminaries. Malkin shot 3-4, missing the last target, while Heatley hit his first two but missed on the third. Andrew Cogliano walked off as the winner of the Fastest Skater competition.
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