We just completed an interesting All-Star Weekend! We had a Saturday night of Skills Challenge contestants getting disqualified, 3-point shooting displays from new champ Tyler Herro and Mac McClung winning his third straight Slam Dunk Contest crown. There was the debut of the new All-Star format, which is already drawing rave reviews and severe criticism at the same time. We also have the stretch run of the regular season starting Wednesday, and the NBA Stock Report never takes a week off.
Big Story: Did the All-Star format work?
Well … that was officially an All-Star Game (or games?), I guess. The new format to make the players care about the All-Star Game and put on a competitive show debuted Sunday. There are a lot of mixed reviews on it. I saw some people saying the tournament format injected new life into the All-Star Game, much like we’ve seen from the Play-In and NBA Cup tournaments. Others said it was confusing: too clunky/disorganized and there wasn’t enough basketball. To be fair, both statements could be correct.
TNT was broadcasting its final All-Star Game (at least until another media deal gives them TV rights again) and trying to juggle this new format, which entailed three mini-games being a race to 40 points. We had the three teams of eight All-Stars, as selected by the fans, players, media and coaches. A fourth team was the winning squad of the Rising Stars Game from Friday night. Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green did not like the fourth team being allowed to play.
Before the tournament tipped Sunday, he was quoted that the Rising Stars players “don’t deserve the privilege of playing on Sunday.” That’s supposed to be a sacred, earned day to play on All-Star weekend. That wasn’t all Green said, though. Remember, he’s an employee of TNT, so he was on the panel between mini-games and hit that point even harder after the first game:
“You work all year to be an All-Star, and you get to play up to 40 (points), and you’re done. This is so unfair to Victor Wembanyama, who just took this game really seriously, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who just took this game really seriously. When you talk about chasing after the points records, Melo and Kobe and all these guys, who have had great scoring nights, (players) don’t get the opportunity to do that with this game — all so we can watch some Rising Stars. We’re about to watch the Olympic team, now we get the treat of watching the Olympic team play against a U-19 team. Come on, what are we doing? This is ridiculous.”
But as Charles Barkley reminded Green, the All-Stars did this to themselves. They didn’t take the competitive nature of the All-Star Game seriously in recent years. We’ve had maybe four close All-Star Games in the past decade. And even then, you could question whether or not the competitive nature has been there, with teams regularly reaching 170, 180 and 190 points in a 48-minute game. Last year’s 211-186 debacle caused commissioner Adam Silver to go off script and admonish the players for what was on display. That made the NBA feel like they had to adopt the Rising Stars format to try to inject some life into this thing. Maybe using the Rising Stars to bait the All-Stars into trying was intentional on a few levels. It was essentially shaming the players into playing some defense.
