Brianna Decker wins NHL All-Star Skills competition, doesn’t get check

Wisconsin women’s hockey legend Brianna Decker beat the world at Friday’s NHL All-Star Skills competition, but the NHL ended up giving the first-place reward to the second-place finisher.

For All-Star Weekend, the NHL invited women’s hockey stars Decker, Kendall Coyne Schofield, Rebecca Johnston, and Renata Fast to introduce the skills competition. When Decker was called on to demonstrate the passing competition, she completed it in only 1:06.

After Decker casually completed the skill competition with the exact same constraints as the men, the NHLers got their turn, and the best they could do was Leon Draisaitl’s 1:09.

Since Decker’s time was “unofficial,” the $25,000 prize was awarded to Draisaitl. This is especially notable because that prize money would have nearly doubled Decker’s 2019 hockey income, but instead it served as a 0.27% increase to Draisaitl’s roughly $9 million salary.

Naturally, Twitter was filled with righteous anger.

After a while, someone stepped up and agreed to write that house down payment-sized check for Decker, but not the NHL:

The genius marketing move by CCM bumped #PayDecker up to viral status and earned some love from another Badger hockey legend:

Decker then took to Twitter to thank CCM: