NHL awards: A fun or frivolous event?

Hockey has utilized a unique practice in the sporting universe when it comes to the annual NHL awards show. For most professional sports, the awards are announced in a simple fashion, such as a press release, and accepted on separate occasions in separate venues.

The NHL, however, goes all out, hosting a full-on awards presentation to announce their best players each year. This show looks to emulate the spectacle of the Oscars while shining a spotlight on the league’s top players.

Having an awards show for a single league is an interesting idea. While ESPN holds its own awards show, the ESPYs, that focuses on all sports and are influenced by a fan vote that skews towards the more popular sports. By hosting its own show, the NHL gives itself a stage to stand on that it may not receive from the ESPYs.

This solitary showing can be seen in both a positive and negative light for the league. The NHL awards show does a fantastic job of showing players and fans in a different light to the world. Fans get to see representation from all over the sport under one roof, giving the opportunity for players to be shown as, well, more than just hockey players.

This is what fans typically want from their sports stars, to see them as just another person. An honest speech after an award presentation or a humble handshake from the runner-up can go a long ways toward humanizing an athlete.

This sort of representation cannot be accomplished through a mere press release. The impact on the league can mean more than just making a player more popular, it can create new fans for the team.

Besides this, people like awards and consequently enjoy award shows. From the Oscars to the ESPYs, award shows spur discussion about what it means for something or someone to be truly great. This conversation is, in many ways, as important as the awards handed out during the show.

By creating a large show, this gives fans of the NHL a reason to talk about the previous season before moving on to the draft and planning for the year ahead.

Like anything else, though, it is not all positives about the awards show. Even if it is popular among NHL fans, it can ring hollow for the sports community at large. By hosting their own awards show in a style similar to the Oscars, the NHL can look like a self-serving league desperate to create an artificial spotlight to draw attention to itself.

From this perception, the league can appear weak, as if it cannot allow the conversation around the awards drive the story. The fourth-rated of the four major sports needs to put itself on a stage and show off celebrities to create a narrative of increased relevance in popular culture.

While fighting to be a part of the popular culture is an important part of growing the league, there is only so much that an awards show can actually do. Hockey is a naturally exclusionary sport due to the nature of the game. No amount of celebrity names or showcasing of talent will make the sport more accessible to people. And certainly, episodes like last Wednesday’s between U.S. Olympic gymnast and NHL legend Marcel Dionne do not help.

Despite those negatives, the NHL is still smart to host this event. Moments like the donation to the Bryan and Amanda Bickell Foundation and the acceptance speeches are more numerous and more meaningful than Dionne-Raisman.

There is something that feels genuinely exciting about seeing these great athletes in a room together to do nothing other than celebrate for one night. It is a different atmosphere than the All-Star game and an important part of hockey culture.

In the end, that’s all that matters. There will always be some sports fans that find the idea of a large, self-servicing award show as tacky. But as long as NHL fans like it, then the event is succeeding.

Perhaps in the future other major sports will take up the spectacle and host their own events. But for now, we all get to enjoy the show the NHL puts on.