Jaccob Slavin wins shooting accuracy competition

This time last week, Jaccob Slavin was reconfiguring his bye-week travel plans to head to St. Louis to represent the Carolina Hurricanes at the NHL All-Star Game following the injury to Dougie Hamilton. A week later, he’s wearing the crown of the most accurate shooter in the National Hockey League.

The extra C, as we knew all along, is for champion.

Slavin’s time of 9.505 seconds to hit five targets in the shooting accuracy competition at Friday night’s NHL All-Star Skills competition was the best out of eight participants, and earned him the honor of an on-ice interview with Pierre McGuire. He was the second-to-last player to shoot, ahead of only hometown hero Alex Pietrangelo of the Blues, so he had plenty of time to see his competition post their times.

The best of the bunch through six shooters was the Oilers’ Leon Draisaitl, who posted a time of 10.257 seconds while taking just seven shots to hit the targets. Slavin took eight shots, but fired more quickly, and his time took the title.

“It doesn’t sound right, but I’ll take it,” Slavin joked to McGuire. And he went one better: he had a strategy, but it didn’t pan out — and he still won anyway. “ I think I aimed for the bottom left and ended up hitting the middle one. Hey, it works,” Slavin said in his usual understated way.

Slavin earlier was stopped in the save streak competition by the Lightning’s Andrei Vasilevskiy — and, of note, he did not go to his standby backhand top-shelf shootout move. His night complete, he’ll take part in tomorrow night’s All-Star tournament as part of the Metropolitan Division squad.