In an All-Star Game that featured compelling basketball and baffling scheduling decisions, Team Shaq defeated Team Chuck in the final behind an MVP performance from Steph Curry.
Curry scored 12 points in the final game as Shaq’s OGs won, 41-25. Curry led the OGs with four rebounds and added an assist, plus a series of classic Curry big game moments: Turnaround threes, long-distance shots, no-look passes fired directly out of bounds.
It’s Curry second All-Star MVP award, awarded due to his 20 combined points in dispatching Team Candace (a bunch of rookies and sophomores that included Golden State Warriors center Trayce Jackson-Davis and Team Chuck (mostly international players plus Trae Young and Donovan Mitchell). Poor Victor Wembanyama just can’t get past Curry in a big game.
But this All-Star Game was very strange. The new format pitted three eight-player teams of All-Stars against one another in a round robin tournament, with the fourth team being the team who advanced out of the Rising Stars round robin tournament. Each game was played to a final score of 40 points, not based on time.
The teams were drafted by “Inside The NBA” personalities Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kenny Smith, and ended up being teams of young All-Stars (Kenny), international players (Chuck), and future Hall of Famers + Boston Celtics (Shaq). This was due to the analyst’s own ideas and personal quirks or a conspiracy by Adam Silver to unofficially create nationalistic rivalries.
Did this work to make the game more competitive? Yes, to a degree. Wembanyama was blocking shots, players were getting back on defense, and while Team Shaq kept going for a long-range kill shot to dispatch Team Candace, they ultimately won by getting a lot of layups and dunks. This was the kind of intensity Silver and the NBA wanted!
Only the result was that the telecast had the least amount of basketball in All-Star Game history. Player introductions and on-court emcee Kevin Hart riffing with Ernie Johnson made the game start 15 minutes late. Despite being played to 40 points, each game had at least two timeouts, replete with extended commercials. Then there were long intermissions between games, so the players could warm up and Kevin Hart could tell a national TV audience that Shaq was “dressed like a porn director.” Enjoy the game, kids!
During one break, Mr. Beast had a fan try to make one long-range shot before Damian Lillard could sink three of them, to win $100K. The fan eventually did it, but the game took forever. Then during the final, with Team Shaq up 11-1, they took an extended break for a tribute to TNT’s “Inside The NBA,” where Hart gave out fishing gear to the crew in honor of this being the final NBA All-Star Game to be broadcast on TNT.
Only…why did this happen in the middle of the final game? Why wasn’t it before the game, or at one of the countless intermissions? And why was it happening at all, given that Ernie, Chuck, Shaq, and Kenny are still doing the show next season, in the same studio, just for ESPN instead? The tribute felt like they were retiring, not just getting licensed.
