The NHL All-Star Game takes place today in Ottawa at 4pm EST. Team Chara will take on Team Alfredsson in a full game showcasing all of the offensive prowess and personality of the game's best (and healthiest).Last night's Skills Competition had some great moments, as Team Alfredsson took home the win. I feel a little ashamed to admit it, but the stuff from Corey Perry and Patrick Kane in the Breakaway Challenge actually made me dislike them a tiny bit less.

Obviously, I'm not going to tell you who to root for in today's game, but team Chara has both Red Wings representatives. You can root for Team Alfredsson if you want, but we're not friends today if you do.

In charity news, Team TPL leads the WIIM/TPL All-Star Challenge with 10.5 points to our 7.5 (The winning skills relay team had four representatives from each of our squads, so we split those three points). After jumping out to a commanding 9-0 lead in the Fastest Skater, Breakaway Challenge, and Accuracy Shooting competitions, team WIIM got back within striking distance thanks to a 108.8mph slapper from Zdeno Chara and some creative shootout scoring by our very own Steven "Spicoli" Stamkos.

It's anybody's game going into this afternoon. It's also not too late to get a pledge in to benefit the Humane Society of Michigan. Remember that the largest pledger for each site gets to pick among the six Red Wings bobbleheads this year (courtesy the generous and awesome @ayronatthewings) and every $5 you donate gets you an entry into a raffle drawing for one of the other four bobbles. Get a pledge in for the WIIM comeback and help a great cause.

So the draft is complete and here is your soon-to-be winning team. Head on over to The Production Line to check out their lineup as well.

THE FORWARDS

Meet the rest of the team below and get a breakdown of how the scoring will work.

Continue reading this post »

We'll be dropping all the picks as they happen in the comments.

Graham picked first and of course he took Pavel Datsyuk.

Stay tuned for the rest.

Editor's note: Post moved back to the top of the page. We're doing the draft today and will be live-tweeting/blogging the results. Don't forget to get your pledges in to benefit the Humane Society of Michigan. Stay tuned for the fun

As you'll remember from last year, we here at Winging It In Motown and the awesome gentlemen over at The Production Line got together with the mutual goal of making the All-Star weekend more exciting for people who just kind of wanted to see the regular season resume. Together, the two blogs had a fantasy All-Star player draft where we picked among the All-Stars and the rookies that were in Raleigh that weekend and watched as our teams earned us points in the Skills Competition and the All-Star Game proper.

At the end of the weekend, it was the good guys at WIIM pulling off an incredibly narrow victory over the TPL braintrust (it came down to Patrick Sharp winning the post-game MVP award and the points that team WIIM needed to overcome the deficit caused by Team TPL's Alex Ovechkin actually earning penalty minutes in the All-Star Game). Good times were had by all and to the victors went the beery spoils when we got together at H2H2.

This year, we've been in touch with our friends at TPL again and have decided that we had too much fun last year to not do it again. We're still yet to finalize all the details about whether we're going to change any rules or what we're going to have riding on it, but that will all get decided later this week and we'll get the draft done. Of course, part of the good that came from last year's challenge was the money everybody raised for charity in the run-up to H2H2 back then. We've decided to open up the pledge drive for the weekend for this challenge.This year, we're working on pledges for the Humane Society of Michigan.

So have some fun with us this weekend as we watch the All-Star game and why not make a few pledges based on the outcome? You can pledge whatever you want for whichever side, or bid for individual players. If you want to put $5 to charity for Datsyuk scoring an All-Star hat trick or if you want to put a certain amount on your favorite team's point totals (for reference, the points score was 57.6 to 50.4 last year) let us know. Let's have some fun and earn some charity money for the Humane Society of Michigan while we're at it.

Tweet, email or comment with your pledges. Thanks and let's go Red Wings!

Check out Team TPL's Logo

Team Chara and Team Alfredsson set their rosters tonight with the All-Star draft. NBC Sports Network will have live coverage of the draft at 8EST tonight.

I know a lot of people don't particularly care for the All-Star Game, but I'll tell you that I absolutely love the new Draft format. I think the NHL actually got something done better than any of the other professional leagues in how they handle their All-Star weekend. The draft brings a new level of interest to an otherwise stale setup.

So who do you think goes last this year? Phil Kessel's teammate Joffrey Lupul is an assistant captain to Zdeno Chara this season and you have to think that he avoids getting the car two years in a row.

How many picks do you think they go before our boys Pavel Datsyuk and Jimmy howard are taken?

Who do you think wins it if they add a diving contest to the skills challenge?

What's your favorite part of the All-Star weekend?

It's your Thursday night open thread. Have at it.

I don't know about you folks, but I'm not wasting a day off treating it like Sunday: Part 2. I'll be watching the Winter Classic today between the Flyers and the Rangers and trying to decide within the first period which side I'm going to root for. I had a list of pros and cons written up for each team, but I always know it's going to come down to whichever side pisses me off first.

With the game being in Philly, there's a very good chance I'll be pulling for the Rangers by the end of it. Unfortunately, the Rangers have fewer likeable players than Philly.

It's a Winter Classic Open Thread. Let me know which side you're pulling for and why.

Back in October, as part of SB Nation's marketing partnership, the fine fellows at TiqIQ sponsored an NHL "Take a Seat contest which allowed readers to try and win 2 tickets to see a regular season hockey game in December/January this season. Here's the pertinent info:

The contest ended at the end of November, the entries were tallied, and three winners from across SB Nation have been declared. Somebody from Stanley Cup of Chowder, somebody else from Fear the Fin, and somebody we actually know and like from right here at Winging It In Motown, our very own ElFuego51, who is proving in his pregames so far this year to have a certain knack for predicting things.

Now you'll see if you look today that Bertuzzi has since been tied by Franzen and overtaken by Jonathan Ericsson for the lead in penalty minutes on the Wings, but those happened after November 30th.

Congrats to Elfuego51 for the victory. Have fun at the game you end up going to courtesy the TiqIQ folks!

It's time to update our season-long WIIM Prediction Contest leaderboard (like I said I'd do last weekend.. yeah, sorry about that. But first, we've got to do just a little bit of bookkeeping. We didn't have a poll for the PotG winner for Friday's game against Buffalo and we need your votes to decide on that.Voting is below, but first, let's go over who tops the scoreboard to this point.

Our leaders through 23 of the 24 games the Wings have played to this point are as follows

Congrats to Darthferrer for being the only person to correctly hit two bonus predictions to this point in the season, coming on strong to hit the Boston and Tampa Bay games recently. Meanwhile, RandomWingsDude has one correct bonus prediction, but has easily been the most consistent guesser this season, with at least one prediction right in seven of the 23 games we've counted.

Atop the individual prediction standings, Igorzba and RandomWingsDude have each correctly predicted three scores. Correctly hitting the player of the game prediction, our own Random Nostradamus joins Jason T and Holmstrom96 at the top of that category with 5 apiece.

If you don't see your name up there, take heart. There's a good chance you're one of the 45 people who have either 1 or 2 points and, as Darthferrer has proven over the last four games, you can make up ground very quickly. So keep those predictions coming and don't forget to vote for the player of the game against Buffalo.