Below are the highlights of the All-Star Game from nhl.com. They are taken from the Versus telecast and feature Mike Emrick and Brian Engblom and their supporting cast.

You will note in these highlights how very little play-by-play they do during the telecast, how little actual description there is of what’s happening on the ice. If you watched the whole game, this is quite representative of how the telecast went (although it did get better at the end, as the game did). For the vast majority of time, it was endless conversation about many things, but little of it focused on where the puck was, who had it and what they were doing with it.

Before you fill the comments section below with all manner of pro- or anti-Emrick or pro- and anti-Engblom remarks, hold on — that’s not the point here. Both Emrick (who is the usual announcer on Devils telecasts seen here) and Engblom (who has worked live games for L.A. Kings radio and ESPN) — and Eddie Olzcyk when he’s healthy — are expertly capable of providing precise and lively accounts of what’s going on during games and why.

However, when you see and hear a Versus game, and an NBC game as well, that standard is abandoned for nonstop conversation that too often ignores the game’s action. Most likely, that’s not the decision of the guys behind the mic but the guys behind the scenes, who instruct the announcers to “tell stories” at the expense of providing clear descriptions and analysis. They do hockey a massive disservice.

Another disservice has to do with the toys the networks have to play with, which have little to do with the announcers. So not only did we get play-by-play man and analyst in nonstop anecdotal dialogue yesterday, we also had players wearing microphones during the game (in both U.S. and Canada), plus reporters on the benches and in the stands, all of whose voices just had to be heard while some incredible passes and shots were being made and goals were being scored.

The only truly worthwhile interview among these that amplified the action came just over seven minutes into the second period when Emrick was able to learn from Martin St. Louis that his shot hit the post as he tried to finish off a nice play.

For that one very good moment, viewers had to endure an inset of Marc Savard’s head distracting from Tomas Kaberle’s sharp head-man pass to Alex Kovalev for his first breakaway goal, listening to bench chatter when Evgeni Malkin scored by shooting between his feet, Yvan Cournoyer talking about the fans while Kovalev was scoring his second breakaway goal, St. Louis being interviewed about Guy Lafleur as a goal was scored, a great save by Henrik Lundqvist (his only one) lost in some conversation, players on the bench being interviewed as the game was finally being hotly contested down the stretch and goals were pouring in.

All-Star Games are goalfests. If someone thought they could squeeze all this in and not take away from the action, they’d either never seen an All-Star Game before or are so focused on making the event appear IMPORTANT on TV with all the people running around the Bell Centre holding microphones that the truly important stuff gets lost.

Time and again, great plays went undescribed as they happened, only to be summarized — sometimes — after they happened. That unmatched skill is the only reason to watch an All-Star Game! But rather than amplify it, someone in charge thought it was better to obscure it. It’s supposed to be a showcase event, it’s supposed to attract new viewers, but the showcase is broken and new viewers are unlikely to be attracted to this mess.

Here’s a simple set of facts about televising any N.H.L. game that just seems lost on network executives and, increasingly, too many local team rightsholders as well:

The game is faster than ever before. The main cameras are farther away in most buildings than they were 15 years ago. Every player wears a helmet and not everyone can recognize a player by his skating style. Lines are juggled constantly. Because of injuries, trades and free agency, (well, there are fewer trades these days, but wait as the deadline approaches) new players are constantly coming in and out of the lineup. There are 30 teams anyway and most fans, even good ones, can’t keep track of who plays for which team once they get out of their favorite team’s division.

But too few times, the words don’t match the picture that the viewer needs matched to help focus his attention on the game. The execs obviously think viewers can follow the action plus absorb all this other chit-chat about allegedly relevant information, which is most often totally irrelevant. It ends up being a major distraction and, after a while, the viewer loses interest in the game. He or she needs the voices coming out of the TV to help him or her make sense of what is happening on the ice. If the talent is straying all over the place, if they don’t seem interested in the game, why should the viewer be interested in the game?

Then, you get the All-Star Game, where no one is in their team’s uniform, no one is playing with the players they usually play with, many numbers are unfamiliar. If the voices are off somewhere else, the viewer is tortured trying to follow the game. It’s better to hit the mute button, and we know people who did.