Let your All-Star anger go
Official stance from the Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza: The watchability (or lack thereof) of Sunday's proceedings is just not an issue worth obsessing over in 2024
INDIANAPOLIS — In the NFL's Pro Bowl, actual gridiron football has been replaced by flag football and skills competitions.
In the NHL, 44 All-Stars are divided into four teams of 11 to play 3-on-3.
Those leagues have already given into the reality that the fight #thisleague stubbornly keeps waging is pretty much unwinnable at this point.
All-Star Games, in modern sport, just aren't special or even necessary. They largely don't work. Not unlike ESPN's SportsCenter as the place to go for sports highlights, they have very limited remaining utility.
In the NBA especially, today's stars are seemingly in our lives hourly. Every great play on hardwood circulates worldwide in seconds via countless social media channels. It wasn't like that in 1984 or 1994 or even 2004. We routinely see the spectacular from the world's best and it just isn't reasonable to expect the foremost basketball players on Earth to hit those heights in an exhibition game with no stakes.
Sunday's 211-186 rout for All-Star Weekend host Tyrese Haliburton and the Eastern Conference predictably unleashed a torrent of criticism and howls of outrage about the 168 combined 3-pointers attempted by East and West … and the corresponding lack of discernible defense from either team … and the fact that only three fouls were committed all night.
As usual, however, many howlers are guilty of over-romanticizing the past. How many All-Star Games have been truly memorable?
I'd say four or five tops have stuck with me through 31 seasons of NBA coverage and a long run of fervent fandom before that. The list starts with 1983 in Los Angeles ... all because of Marvin Gaye's peerless rendition of the national anthem. Rolando Blackman's "confidence, baby, CONFIDENCE" free throws to force overtime in 1987. Magic Johnson's MVP performance in Orlando in 1992 after HIV stunningly forced him into retirement at the start of the season. Michael Jordan's last All-Star Game in Atlanta in 2003 that went to double-overtime. And very selfishly speaking: Dirk Nowitzki's last All-Star Game in Charlotte in 2019 ... which delivered the bonus of the highest honor of my professional career.
Legendary Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan is one of my heroes, but I was not "personally offended [by] this disgraceful farce taking place right now in Indy" as Bob tweeted we should be. I have come to accept that All-Star Weekend can't be like it was in 1987, when scenes like those starring Blackman felt so unique and magical because the All-Stars weren't nearly as accessible to us back then as they are now. Getting them all together in one place was truly something special.
Usually I'm as resistant to NBA change as the most renowned media curmudgeons, but I've opted to concede that All-Star Weekend in the 21st century is best viewed as a league convention. It's about the merchandise and the fashion statements and the hoopla. The standout moments we're likely to get involve Nikola Jokić pouring water on an unsuspecting Luka Dončić.
And that's OK.
Three reasons why I have adopted this position:
🏀 You think all the shouting and pleas for some semblance of All-Star defense have been loud? The (Sunday Night and) Monday Morning Quarterbacking would be 20 times louder if someone actually got hurt in the All-Star Game trying to play defense.
🏀 By Thursday or Friday, no one is going to give a rip about happened Sunday night at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, so why get so worked up about it? There are plenty of other things in the NBA that more urgently need fixing. Sunday night's TNT audience somehow rose 14% percent from last year's worst-of-all-time, howl-inducing debacle in Salt Lake City, so the Indy scenes must not have been as utterly disgraceful to the basketball public as described. Also: My suspicion is that ESPN would love to wrest All-Star Weekend, warts and all, from TNT's parent company (Warner Bros. Discovery) in the NBA's next media rights deal if it could. Sunday's TV audience will be recorded as the second-smallest in NBA All-Star history, but it still out-rated the NBA's No. 1 game this season (Celtics/Lakers on ABC averaged just over 5 million viewers) on Christmas Day.
🏀 Games unavoidably get away from us in the 3-Point Era. It happens all the time during the regular season and it happened Sunday night. As my pal Tom Ziller smartly noted in his Monday morning piece, Damian Lillard and Haliburton combined to drain 21 triples while the West was shooting a chilly 25-for-71 from deep as a team. Leave it to another fellow Substacker (
So …
I'm not going to rail against today's players about their collective lack of All-Star care factor when two of North America's four traditional major sports leagues have given in to these realities and gone away from their traditional All-Star Games completely. I have a much tougher time accepting all the regular-season blowouts. Or the fact that All-Star rosters continue to feature only 12 players per conference — same it was when the NBA was a 23-team league for much of the 1980s.
Remember: Being selected as an All-Star, much more than whatever happens on the floor, is what endures. I just can't get too worked up about the game itself and won't be surprised at all if the NBA, just like the NFL and the NHL, comes up with something else for Sunday night someday soon.
I keep theorizing fixes for All-Star Weekend. I originally typed a few ideas here. And then I deleted them. Let it go, Sherm, let it go.
The play in the ASG is disrespectful to the fans when it comes down to it. Like alot of other things the money has ruined it. Kobe and LeBron didn't dog it 15 years ago. So just cancel it stop the fronting and move on.
Also NHL and NFL have physical contact every play and shift. No one is saying to go out there and take a charge but to chuck up garbage is drek. Players don't care. Its a joke.