Connor McDavid facing accusations of rigging the skills competition for himself

Leading up to this weekend's All-Star festivities in Toronto, there was lots of discussion surrounding the skills competition and how the NHL could improve it. To ensure things improved over last year's event in Florida, the league reached out to Connor McDavid to help set up the individual competitions to restore the competition to its former glory.

To the credit of both McDavid and the league, the skills competition was much more entertaining this year than it has been in a very long time. To no one's surprise, though, McDavid walked away with the $1M prize. Although McDavid is the best player in the league, many fans took to social media following his win to question whether he had set up the event to help himself with the $1M prize. Even The Athletic's James Mirtle went as far as saying "Connor McDavid wins the Connor McDavid skills competition."


McDavid downplayed his involvement in redesigning the competition during his press conference following the event, saying that there were lots of people involved, naming members of the NHL, but did not name another player that had any input.


As mentioned, this was by far the best skills competition in a long time, and kudos to McDavid for helping revive it. It does, however, seem a little suspicious that the guy that revamped each individual skill event is also the one that won half of them and the overall competition, does it not? At the very least, it gave him a competitive edge that the other players didn't have.