The NBA All-Star Game was designed to serve a handful of different functions on the fly, so no wonder it’s a haphazard mess.
SAN FRANCISCO — In his postgame press conference, whether subconsciously or inadvertently or both, Steph Curry said there were times during All-Star Sunday night when it “felt like the game got in the way a little bit.”
Curry also said the tournament style format and the relatively clipped length of games (42 minutes of basketball, total, were played in the night’s three-hour runtime) didn’t “allow a strong storyline to build” and that the day before Kyrie Irving had asked whether they were “playing this year” to which Curry confirmed they were.
None of this is meant to be disparaging, certainly not to Curry and not even really to the game itself — at least at its face value. The All-Star Game is of a bygone era. Made for when our exposure to the league’s biggest stars couldn’t be satisfied by a quick scroll or a search, or by their own amateur or professionally produced clips and content coming into our still-nonexistent social media feeds. The game is still an event where superstars physically take up the same floor in such a specific configuration for one time all season, but its purpose has changed.
Somewhere along the way the All-Star Game became a catch-all. An event to satisfy sponsors, attract new brands, and propel NBA partners toward its captive audience. It’s also become an event concerned with innovation — like getting robotic dogs to whip t-shirts into the crowd on a commercial break — and celebrating its people and “product.” It’s ripe and new territory for influencers, an old favorite of celebrities, a mixed bag for media and a lot of work for the NBA’s staff. It’s a bit of a bittersweet, occasionally bizarre, tired end to a long weekend, simultaneous crown jewel and finish line, and somewhere in there, a game of basketball gets played.
The game didn’t take on all these things at once. The progression has been gradual, little additions and adjustments made through the years. The problem is that as new components are added, nothing has been stripped away. The result is the unwieldy, laboring, expensive and very long night we have in front of us.
As the de facto ambassador for the Bay, Curry was involved with some of the decision-making around the All-Star Game’s format this year. For the most part he seemed satisfied, but noted there was always room for improvement. He said that each of its participants have the choice to make it what they want it.
Well, if only.
Nikola Jokic said maybe it’s time we accept this is just what it is, Jaylen Brown admitted in his All-Star media availability a day before the game that he had no idea how the new format worked, and Draymond Green, true to form, said he didn’t think it was right that a team of rookies got the chance to play in the game because of its format adjustment.
All Stars already have a choice. As a group they represent the most viable decision-makers in the league. And yet, a choice, made, is a lot different than an opinion, offered.
Athlete passivity around the game, or the willingness to critique it but not necessarily work to adjust it (note that I’m not saying “fix it”), is absolutely a hindrance to its functionality, but a common reaction to too much (stimulus, choice, demand, details — take your pick) is to freeze up and make no decision at all. These guys seem just as stymied by the expectational and actual weight of the game as the rest of us. The difference is they’re being told they are there to play competitive, entertaining basketball, and then asked to step off the floor for segments run by YoutTubers, an endless array of AI-infused GameOps to fill extended commercial breaks, tributes (the TNT send-off was nice, but it shouldn’t have happened in the middle of the game) and monologues by Kevin Hart or whoever the next host is going to be.
Going forward it seems there will be two forks in the road for the league to follow. One, to take the best learnings from the past few years of All-Star Games and put them together where it makes sense. For example, go back to a two team format but keep a target score for each half.
The other option is that we keep on like this, adding and tacking on until the structure makes even less sense, and the night grows too dense to have a point. Jokic, in his wisdom, may be right that this a reality we just have to get used to, that the world around the game has changed too much for the game to serve the purpose it did in its inception.
Curry echoed as much in his presser. “I think it was a good step in the right direction to reinvigorate the game in some way. And then you tinker with it again next year, and see what changes you can make,” he said.
“I don’t want to compare it to any other era, because the world has changed, life is different, the way people consume basketball’s different, so it’s not going to look like it used to but it can still be fun for everybody,” Curry said before adding, a bit abruptly, “I had fun, our team had fun, that’s kind of all that matters.”
Walking through the tunnels after All-Star media wrapped I ran into a dense tangle of people, all with their phones out. This isn’t a rare sight over the weekend, with former stars, musicians, mascots, minor celebrities, and of course current All-Stars walking around. What everyone had stopped for this time though were the vaguely nefarious Boston Dynamics robot dogs that had accompanied Shaq out onto the floor and later whipped t-shirts into the crowd during one of the night’s many extended stoppages.
People were clamoring for the dogs to perform, pressing in on every side as they walked jerkily forward. It felt both bizarre and dark, considering that the use of these “dogs” are for policing. Like a preview of a distant future we consider far off, but is already here and less than we hoped for.
Is basketball the interlude of the All-Star Game, or its point? Settle that chicken-or-egg causality and we might have a game.
