Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, came up with a new format for the NBA All-Star Weekend. In recent years, the All-Star games have been struggling, with players simply not caring about the games and fans thinking it has been boring. This year, Adam Silver decided to change it up to spark something in players and fans alike.
For many casual NBA fans, the All-Star break is a time to get back into basketball. Many fans watch opening day and the first few weeks, then wait till the trade deadline and the All-Star games to tune back in until the playoffs. Previously, especially since 2020 when Kobe Bryant passed, the All-Star games have just been entirely uninteresting due to the lack of defense and players just messing around and not trying. The NBA needed to switch the format to make the players interested in actually trying to get fans interested again.
The New Format
This year the NBA decided to change to a tournament format. Four teams including 24 players, three games, one champion. There were three true All-Star teams, voted in by fans. The other team was a rising stars team, the best players in their first or second year. The NBA selected rising stars teams for the last spot in the real tournament.
There were four rising stars teams for a mini tournament on Friday, February 14. On Saturday, the skills challenges took place, being: NBA skills challenge, three-point contest, then dunk contest. Then Sunday- the main show- the all star tournament took place. First, there was an exhibition G-League game, featuring some of the best G-League players. Then the real tournament followed: two games to get into the championship, first team to 40 points wins. It started as Kenny vs Chuck and Shaq vs Cadence Parker. Then the winners would play in the championship.
My Opinion
I’m going to start by saying, this was terrible. I genuinely didn’t enjoy watching this. The biggest problem of the All-Star Weekend was that the players didn’t care for the games because it didn’t matter, and to start the weekend, the NBA streamed Draymond Green saying this is going to be terrible. When a player like Draymond Green, of all people, clowns something, you know it is going to be bad. Even going into this the players didn’t care. LeBron James and Kevin Durant even said earlier in the year that this was not going to be fun or bring attention back to the games. That is not a good look for fans at all.
Then, we get to the skill challenges and we see the Spurs roster making a joke of the game. That is not enjoyable to watch. Then the NBA disqualifies their team in the game and refuses to interview them, which would have actually been enjoyable to watch for the average fan. And this is all before the worst of it even happened. The dunk contest I did think was actually great, but the 3-point contest was seriously awful. At this point, it’s just boring.
By Sunday, I was already mad with the NBA. Then I turn my TV on to actually watch the first game: Kenny versus Chuck. However, what I saw was that the players actually did care a little. I was wrong about that come game time. But now a new problem has come up, not to say the effort was great by any means, but it was better.
The “total points” as the way to win it completely just messes up the whole point of the games. There is not enough basketball. Forty points is just not a lot of points, and it is incredibly easy for NBA players to score 40 points in a short amount of time, especially when it’s all the best players together.
Then, there was a Mr. Beast game show between games at one point. I watched to watch the best players play basketball not Mr. Beast. Then, in the middle of a game, Kevin Hart stops the game to have a comedy session by roasting the players and coaches. Fans tune in to watch basketball and players come to play basketball, so the NBA decides to stop a game after three minutes to have a nine-minute roast? That is stupid. It wasn’t even funny, either. I just found it completely annoying.
There was also a concert as a half-time of sorts to the day. This I didn’t really hate, I actually kind of liked the idea to give the players a break before the championship.
However, to really seal the deal on my opinion here, in the whole three-hour block of time on Sunday for the All-Star games, there were 42 minutes of basketball. Twenty-two percent of the time period was spent playing basketball. That is terrible. There were 80 minutes of ads, or 44% of the time. The other 60 or so minutes were spent by just filler: the Mr. Beast show, Kevin Hart, the concert, and just more stuff that was completely uninteresting.
It was just generally awful spending about three hours of my Sunday watching something so uninteresting. The NBA needs to change something. TNT is losing their right to host/stream the All-Star games. The rights are going to CBS Sports, so hopefully that is the change that people needed.
