No All-Star show, non-issue

Well the suspension of Nicklas Lidstrom and Pavel Datsyuk for one game, to be served against the Columbus Blue Jackets Tuesday, because they failed to appear at the All-Star festivities is a non-issue.
At least it is in my opinion.
Opinions of the suspension seem mostly divided. Detroit area writers and Red Wings fans are against it. The anti- Gary Bettman people are also against it, but to me that's just to disagree with the commissioner. All the others seem to agree with the suspension. Though they are probably in the minority. As a Red Wings fan who agrees with the suspension I'm probably a minority of one.
Two Detroit area writers who disagree with the suspension are George James Malik and Drew Sharp.
One national writer who also disagrees with the suspension is Michael Farber of Sports Illustrated, Bettman makes bad call with Wings.

If anyone deserved a pass, it is Lidstrom, the six-time Norris Trophy winner who is a wonderful ambassador for hockey. While the All-Star Game should be part of his responsibility, he truly has served his time.

Datsyuk didn't play for most of the third period of the Coyotes game; so his injury must be pretty serious. Couldn't he just take off the first two periods of the upcoming game? That would then be a whole game.
One who agrees with the suspension is the New York Post's Larry Brooks, Showing up here's least they could do.

MONTREAL - You can't have it both ways. You can't ridicule the NHL All-Star Game for featuring rosters that include players of modest renown and then turn around and ridicule Gary Bettman for insisting that those stars chosen to play in the game actually, you know, show up.
The commissioner couldn't be on firmer ground here in enforcing the policy he enunciated at last February's GM meetings that any selected player choosing to skip out on the event would be required to miss either the league game immediately prior or following All-Star weekend in order to verify claims of injury.

Regardless of why the rule is there, regardless of how much time a player has given to the League, the player should still follow the rules.
Lidstrom and Datsyuk are stand-up guys in my opinion. They probably won't complain because they are forthright and magnanimous players. I'd give them the pass, but the commissioner and the League aren't. That's fine with me; I can live with that.
It's better than the alternative - the game meaning something ala Major League Baseball. For that matter the suspension is better than any alternative proposed in Craig Custance's article, Ideas for saving the NHL All-Star Game.
There's already rumblings that the game is a farce, more from Farber in a different article, The All-Star thrill is gone.

But the ambivalence shown by some Detroit players, if not the organization, merely reinforces the idea that the All-Star Game is a played-out notion.
There are annual suggestions of how to make the game better -- "It's Groundhog Day again," Toronto GM Brian Burke said -- but all the gimcracks that have been promised for the skills competition on Saturday just skim the surface. Despite a weekend that will be an overwhelming success simply because it is taking place in a hockey-obsessed host city -- the fans here know that the All-Star Game isn't a game but a swell party -- there is an All-Star fatigue that permeates not merely hockey but every sport.
The core of the problem: the very premise for all of these games has been subverted in recent years. The stars of the sport might not all convene at the same place on the same day during the season, but they can be juxtaposed, compared and contrasted on innumerable highlight shows and Internet clips. Because there is inter-conference play in all sports, these one-off exhibitions cannot even be regarded as some sort of measuring stick.
As the competitive value fades, leagues have turned these games into corporate festivals, splashy ways to sell the brand. The NHL announced $10 million in sponsorships for the 2009 Game. Unlike the attendance figures at the bottom of the stats sheets, the number appears to be legitimate.
The various leagues have begun to address All-Star fatigue, tweaking as they go. The NFL has addressed it by moving the Pro Bowl, its annual no-hitter, to the week prior to the Super Bowl, starting in 2010. Major League Baseball's All-Star Game has added the ridiculous idea of home-field advantage for the World Series for the winning league -- if you want to give a tangible benefit to the winner, the game shouldn't be played like an exhibition -- in order to make the event more relevant. The NBA game might as well be held in a playground, but then that league seems to like it that way.
Of course, the NHL can't emulate basketball because hockey, like football, can turn farcical without intensity. So, Groundhog Day starts again.

So trying to make the All-Star Game relevant again, Bettman and the League are imposing these rules.
Again that's fine with me. It's better than any alternative I've read.