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The Saturday night skills competition at the NHL all-star weekend is meant to showcase the game’s best players, but for goaltenders it can be an injury waiting to happen.
Last year the Islanders’ Rick DiPietro tweaked his hip during the skills competition, which began a cycle of injuries for the 27-year-old netminder. The DiPietro injury was enough precedent for the Vancouver Canucks to keep all-star goaltender and team captain Roberto Luongo out of the Saturday night festivities.
“Even though I am at 100 per cent you don’t want anything to happen and see me back on injured reserve,” Luongo said from Montreal. “It was a mutual decision between the team and myself.”
Luongo has played only three games since missing nearly two months of the season due to a groin injury, will skip the skills competition but expects to participate in the game on Sunday.
While much of the talk leading in to the annual game has been over its lack of relevance, Anaheim goaltender J.S. Giguere might be the event’s lone advocate.
“It is a big way to promote the league and the game and those people who say that it is not the best thing to do then they should come up with something else,” Giguere said of the criticism. “A lot of people are saying it, but nobody has come up with any new ideas. It is easy to criticize but it is not easy to come up with something that makes more sense.”
Saturday night’s Honda/NHL SuperSkills gets underway from the Bell Centre in Montreal at 7 p.m. ET.
