NBA All-Star Weekend Takeaways: Don’t Complain About Lack of Competitiveness

Thoughts on everything that happened in Indianapolis from a record-setting game to a dud of Saturday night’s events.

Takeaways from NBA All-Star weekend, which culminated with a (checks notes) 211–186 Eastern Conference win in Sunday’s All-Star Game.

• Don’t complain about the lack of competitiveness of the All-Star Game. It is what it is. The NBA has tried everything—literally, everything—to get players to care about the game. They dumped the traditional East-West format. They let team captains draft. They reset the score after quarters, adopted the Elam ending and added financial incentives. This year, the league went back to the old format. The result was the first 200-point game and the highest-scoring All-Star Game in history.

Deal with it. Don’t gripe about it on podcasts. Don’t bellyache on social media. There’s simply no way to get today’s players, many of whom have contracts that exceed the GDP of small countries, to treat the All-Star Game as anything more than a glorified pickup game. In 2023, the All-Star Game drew 4.6 million viewers, more than any non-Christmas game from the 2022–23 season. It’s not changing. And it’s not going anywhere.

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• Commissioner Adam Silver with the postgame line of the night when handing out the winners’ trophy: “To the Eastern Conference All-Stars. You scored the most points. Well, congratulations.” Silver had to hate that game. A day earlier, Silver sounded certain the players would take the game more seriously. “I think we’re going to see a good game tomorrow night,” Silver said. Not exactly.

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• All-Star Saturday needs a reinvention. After watching Anthony Edwards firing up left-handed bricks in the Skills Challenge—Edwards claims he is ambidextrous—fans were treated to a Slam Dunk Contest headlined by one All-Star (Jaylen Brown), two rookies (Jaime Jaquez Jr., Jacob Toppin) and a defending champ (Mac McClung) with four NBA games on his résumé—and none this season. The Three-Point Contest, won by Damian Lillard, was captivating, as was the Stephen Curry vs. Sabrina Ionescu shootout (more of that, please), but overall the NBA’s co-main event was a dud.

Lillard won the Three-Point Contest on Saturday night, then followed it up with an MVP performance in the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday :: Trevor Ruszkowski/USA TODAY Sports

• The Slam Dunk Contest, in particular, needs to be mothballed. What was once the weekend’s marquee event has devolved into a gimmicky competition among players casual fans need to look up on Wikipedia. The NBA needs its biggest stars to participate and save for the occasional Brown, none will. The NBA loves innovation: How about a one-on-one competition? Stars are no longer interested in being known as the best dunker. Maybe you can entice them with the title of the league’s best one-on-one player.

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• The NBA, smartly, wanted to keep its All-Star weekend away from the NFL, scheduling it on the first weekend after the Super Bowl. But what about the NBA trade deadline? One of the biggest days on the NBA calendar was swallowed up by the coverage of the Kansas City Chiefs vs. San Francisco 49ers. Here’s an idea: Make the trade deadline the Thursday before the All-Star break. It gets it away from the Super Bowl and traded players have a full week to get integrated with their new teams.
• Absolutely wild that Jayson Tatum and Larry Bird had not met before Sunday night.
• Ionescu, whose 26 made threes matched the best output from anyone in the Three-Point Contest, suggested a rematch next year, when the NBA All-Star weekend is in San Francisco. I say do it sooner, at the WNBA All-Star Game this summer. Next year, expand it with the top-three women shooters (Iowa Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark could be a pro by then) vs. the top-three men.

The Stephen Curry vs. Sabrina Ionescu three-point competition was a highlight of the weekend :: Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports

• Give me more Charles Barkley–Draymond Green. Green, working with Turner for All-Star weekend, and Barkley were part of TruTV’s AltCast. When Green complained to TNT analyst—and Indiana Pacers legend—Reggie Miller about the icy Indiana weather, Barkley asked if Miller preferred the cold or “being around a bunch of homeless crooks in San Francisco.” Next year’s game will be played at the Chase Center.

Chuck going hard on San Fran 😂 https://t.co/Za1RA4Ld7y

— Chris Mannix (@SIChrisMannix) February 19, 2024

• Silver didn’t break much ground in his annual state of the NBA news conference. The NBA is in a great place: “In addition to being the fastest-growing [team] sport in the world, we are the No. 1 participation sport in the United States,” Silver said. The league ditched the innovative All-Star format of the last few years because the games stunk: “People uniformly were critical of last year's All-Star Game and felt it was not a competitive game.” And anyone hoping All-Star rosters will expand beyond 24 players will be disappointed.

Silver did weigh in on the heightened tensions between NBA players and referees, something we covered last week.

“I’m so sympathetic to both players who feel that an official missed a call, and sometimes they do, and I’m incredibly sympathetic to officials who have some of the hardest jobs in sports and are under a microscope and occasionally, of course, do miss calls, and we acknowledge when they do,” Silver said. “I think what makes me most frustrated are … the communication issues between players and officials. I feel that’s an area we should be able to do a better job, both ways. I put that on the category of ‘respect for the game.’”

• More Silver, who unpacked the league’s decision to make the NBA draft a two-day event.

“One, we did hear from our teams that these second-round picks have become increasingly important,” Silver said. “And their ability to reset, not just to have more time, which we’ve offered between picks in the second round, going from two minutes to four minutes, but, in addition, the opportunity to reset after the first round in the draft, to reassess what their needs are and have that data, consider that, was something they were very interested.

“Sometimes given the level of interest in this league, it seemed, frankly, a little bit silly that we were standing there at 12:30 a.m. [ET] at night calling off names for the second round of our draft. To the extent that our partner ESPN came to us and said: There is sufficient interest that, if you’re interested, we think this merits prime-time coverage on ESPN.”