The NHL mastered the All-Star format, now it’s the NBA’s turn.
The NHL has cracked the code when it comes to finding a compelling replacement for its All-Star Game. The “4 Nations Face-Off” is the best thing to happen to hockey in years, with the USA, Canada, Finland, and Sweden playing hard-hitting, compelling hockey — serving as the best palate cleanser before we return to the back-end of the season and the race to the playoffs.
With the final set to take place on Thursday between Team USA and Team Canada, it’s given us an opportunity to showcase the league’s best players competing on fascinating fantasy lines outside of the Winter Olympics or the World Cup. The shortened round robin format also ensured that the tournament didn’t overstay its welcome, and left fans wanting more – which is exactly what the NHL wanted.
The fact the 4 Nations Face-Off happened during the same week as the largely-reviled NBA All-Star Weekend also serves as a stark contrast that while the NBA keeps making its All-Star game a convoluted mess, the NHL is winning with simplicity.
This is the blueprint we’ve talked about for a long time when it comes to fixing All-Star games in sports. For obvious reasons it can never really work in football, but the globalization of basketball makes it the ideal sport to also have it’s own short tournament to showcase more of its international stars.
The biggest difference is that hockey is intensely regional. Incubator nations like Canada, Finland and Sweden made it easy to pick three countries to put with the USA in the tournament. The NBA on the other hand is a little more spread out, with stars coming from a breadth of international countries rather than just a few. For this reason it would make sense to have four key teams:
- USA
- Canada
- Europe
- Rest of the World
The first three are fairly obvious inclusions, with the “Rest of the World” team allowing players from South America, Australia, and Africa to be featured together on one team, essentially allowing for more parity.
In case you’re wondering what the starting fives would look like in a tournament like this here’s a rough mock-up.
Team USA
PG: Jalen Brunson
SG: Anthony Edwards
SF: LeBron James
PF: Jayson Tatum
C: Anthony Davis
Team Canada
PG: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
SG: Jamal Murray
SF: R.J. Barrett
PF: Andrew Wiggins
C: Zach Edey
Team Europe
PG: Luka Doncic
SG: Franz Wagner
SF: Giannis Antetokounmpo
PF: Victor Wembanyama
C: Nikola Jokic
Team Rest of the World
PG: Josh Giddey (Australia)
SG: Dante Exum (Australia)
SF: Jonathan Kuminga (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
PF: Pascal Siakam (Cameroon)
C: Joel Embiid (Cameroon)
Obviously there’s the benches to put together and coaches, but it would be a pretty compelling tournament. The next step would be to tweak the voting. The biggest disconnect right now when it comes to the NBA All-Star Game is that fans are meant to feel like they have agency, but the fan vote ends up being worth very little.
In this multi-nation format any active NBA player would be allowed. Fundamentally this is still a showcase of NBA players, so there wouldn’t be an element to select players from Eurobasket, or outside the USA — similar to how the NHL handled 4 Nations.
Allow for a fan vote, but essentially geolock the fan voting so only media members and fans from those specific parts of the world can vote for the players to represent them. Sure, if someone wants to be sad as hell and use a VPN to vote outside their location there’s not much we can do with it, but this would at least ensure fans have more of a say in who represents them in the tournament.
From here you follow the NHL model. Round robin, then the top two teams play each other for the title. The NBA gives a donation to basketball initiatives in underserved communities to the winning nation, and why not give a little something to the fans? Randomly pick 10,000 fans who submitted votes for the winning nation to get League Pass for free for the following season. Give people a reason to really care about this and put something on the line to include fans and celebrate basketball.
It would be a damn sight better than the current state of the NBA All-Star Game, and I know that’s not saying much, but this would be a good start.
