The NBA All-Star Game remains one of the most talked about subjects in sports this time of year. Football has just ended so people are looking for other sports and the All-Star Game is a place people go. The issue is that there is typically a lack of effort from the players, which was a big discussion last year. It didn’t bother me but it bothered the league enough that they wanted to make it into a whole new format. Did it work?
The new format was the 24 All-Stars would be divided into 3 teams of 8 and they would play in a tournament, with the 4th team being the champions of the Rising Stars Challenge. One problem is that the Rising Stars are not All-Star and playing on All-Star Sunday is a big deal in our league. Draymond Green was one person who was not a fan of this and he expressed this a lot on the TNT broadcast, like too many times. I do think he was right but he mentioned it so many times that it became annoying. The format was fine to me, guys played hard at times, not to the level the NBA wants but it was more intense than last year. Which leads me to my next point. I remember when in the 2020 All-Star Game that everyone loves to talk about Kemba Walker busted his knee up and was never fully healthy again. So while on that day it is fun to watch, maybe it is your favorite team's best player who gets hurt and the season goes off the rails because of it. Is that worth it? To me, the effort of the players was not this year’s biggest issue.
Let’s start with Kevin Hart on the broadcast. He was sitting on the sideline with Ernie Johnson, and 2 of Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O'Neal and Candace Parker. In the first game, he began yelling about how the 7 foot centers need to get under the basket and stop shooting threes. What are we doing? On a night where we should be celebrating our best players and celebrating the NBA as a whole, we have someone, who is being heard over the PA system in Chase Center mind you, talking about one of the things that people trash about the league. When have you ever seen the NFL, MLB or NHL do that? The main reason people say they don’t watch the NBA is ‘too many threes’ and ‘no defense is played.’ Why is someone talking about that on your All-Star broadcast? After that, Hart yelled at Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to ‘do work’ and SGA, essentially, told him to stop his yapping, which was great because it was annoying and added no value to the broadcast. There was no need for Kevin Hart to be there at all, why was he being forced onto us over and over again. They even gave him a trophy after the game for another joke, which was not funny either.
Another reason the format did not work is because over a 3-hour television window, only 30 minutes of basketball was played. After the first game, they had a kid come on to the court and try and make one logo three before Damian Lillard made three logo threes. If he did Mr. Beast (because of course he was there) would give the kid $100,000 dollars. It was fun and the kid did make it. Then, we went to a commercial before we came back and Draymond Green talked about how the format sucks and then went back to commercials before the game started. Then the second game happened, with more commercials during it. After the game, we saw, guess what, another commercial before a concert then a commercial then Draymond talked about how he hated the format and finally another commercial. The game started with an 11-1 run where Jayson Tatum scored 8 points. A timeout was called and we went to commercials. When we came back, Kevin Hart was on the court. Sidenote, as someone who didn’t really care about Kevin Hart before, I don’t like him after this, like we get it, he’s short. Anyways, there was a 7 minute ceremony celebrating Inside the NBA, during the game! The craziest part is, they are still going to be on TV next season just at ESPN and ABC since TNT is losing their NBA broadcasting rights. They’ll be doing the Finals now, something they have never done! If you want to do it, do it instead of the concert or the Mr. Beast shot, or even after the games are done, not during the championship. It took all of the flow out of the game and the rest of the game was Stephen Curry shooting half court shots so he could win MVP, which he did. The whole point of the tournament was to avoid that and all of these stoppages created it.
We are on a collision course for a United States vs. World All-Star game. With the way the NHL’s Four Nations tournament has gone along with how often people keep asking for it, I suspect that is what the All-Star game will look like next season. I feel indifferent towards that because I think that the NBA cares too much about the All-Star Game and figuring out how to get people to like it. I don’t think that'll ever happen and the effort of the game shouldn’t be as big of a deal as we make it seem. With that said, this format never had a chance to succeed because the NBA and TNT didn’t give it the chance to.
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