Normally, the sight of anyone sitting at a podium or standing in front of a mic after an NHL event is no one’s idea of entertainment. After a big win or huge loss, players sip bottled water while evasively noting they’re just giving 100 per cent to help the team, or have to do a better job on the forecheck. Coaches talk about the importance of sticking to systems and being prepared to play a full 60 minutes.

Hockey demands its players be respectful, humble, and gracious. Except when they’re on the ice and free to beat the living snot out of each other while trash-talking like Lenny Bruce channeling Mean Girls with a grade A case of Tourettes.

Occasionally, though, you do get gold. Darryl Sutter answering, “I think he had to go take a shit” when queried about Jonathan Huberdeau leaving the bench mid-game. A peeved John Tortorella asking New York Rangers beat reporter Larry Brooks, “Have you ever fought before?” in a manner that suggested he was ready to drop the gloves.

So helmets off today to hometown hero Michael Bublé, who proved the NHL doesn’t have to be boring at last night’s All-Star draft press conference. The Burnaby crooner was one of four honorary celebrity captains at yesterday’s one-ice draft, helping actual team captain Quinn Hughes select the all-stars who he’ll be playing three-on-three with in the weekend tournament.

For those more addicted to etalk than ESPN, the celebrities on the other three teams were Justin Bieber (evidently some singer from Stratford), Will Arnett (almost unrecognizable in glasses and a baseball hat, and Tate McRae (confession time—we had to do a little Googling to find out who she was, the answer being the Outlaws of Ravenhurst are evidently no longer Calgary's most famous musical export). 

That actual draft was a little awkward, with mics cutting out, players forced to sit through a schoolyard pick format, and Bieber sitting off by himself, perhaps either having a screamingly bad acid trip or being totally creeped out by the indefensibly creepy moustache of Auston Matthews.

But after the draft, it was showtime, with Bublé once again proving himself one of the funniest dudes in show business.

Sitting at the podium, the singer suggested that he wasn’t at his best during the selection process.

“My buddy told me this is just a microdose of mushrooms and he was lying,” he said. “So, I’ll be honest, I thought I was in Blades of Glory for most of the time that I was out there until it sort of settled down and then I realized, ‘Holy shit: I am at the NHL All-Star Game.’”

That’s right, magic mushrooms—suggesting that Bublé does a fair bit of thinking about his material before hitting the stage. Crank, tranq, horse, or bath salts? Too much, so not funny unless your name is Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders, or Scott Weiland.

Weed? Too easy when you come from the land sometimes known as Vansterdamn.

Mushrooms, though, were a master stroke—somehow, even through we’re not totally sure they’re legal, seemingly sold by every third store on Commercial Drive.

They’ve got a cute nickname—’shrooms—that conjures up images of deep-woods druids, burned-out hippies in Nelson, and the mega-fried bangers of circa-’82 Burnaby desperately combing the grass fields of the Res in their mack jackets, Daytons, and Ozzy Osbourne tour T-shirts.

Arnett was quick to run with the mushrooms angle.

“It just occured to me that through all the incredible songs that you’ve done over the years and all the hearts of women that you’ve won over around the world, with all that talk about fantasy hockey, you lost them all in one sentence,” he joked. “It all just evaporated. Years of building it up, and it’s just gone.”

To which Bublé replied, “The mushroom talk costed me all of my contacts, too.”

With that, the singer pulled off a master feat: making it clear that, while the NHL might be famous as the most boringly conservative professional sports league in the world, there might actually be room for the odd character not named Jeremy Roenick, Jeremy Roenick, and, umm, Jeremy Roenick.

Because the last thing the league wants is characters like Jeremy Roenick associated with it, Bublé later made the smart move of suggesting that he was maybe loaded Dean Martin-style instead.

“It was a joke,” Bublé said, noting that, even though he’s been at this forever, some still don’t understand his sense of humour. “Of course I wasn’t! I’m sitting here at dinner. I do have a problem with bread.”

Someone make him the NHL’s next commissioner. And not just because it’s almost guaranteed we’ll have a team back in Quebec before you can say, “Des Nordiques.”

The league needs some colour. And the human funnyman known as Darryl Sutter is currently out of a job.