San Francisco – Let’s give Adam Silver and the Nba this credit: they try, at least, to try to save the NBA All-Star game.
It is not an easy task. The All-Star game and its constellation of events have not long been a culturally relevant or successful sporting event. THE In the NHL canceled his own All-Star game this year, and the Nfl Pro Bowl does not make sense that you may have missed its very existence a few weeks ago.
But the slow and tortured disappearance of the NBA version is particularly painful because of what has been lost. This weekend used to count-from the Slam Dunk competition, to the scenarios that completed, to the game itself.
There was a time when it was a moment of marquee for sport, an engine for the NBA to sell itself to the public, and a showcase for Hoops freed from domination almost all year round.
Now it’s a failure.
The recent versions have barely climbed over the increase in the din in American life, where the rupture is much, much more difficult than a decade or two. Even if it is – and was not – a convincing product.
The league has tried a lot to reverse the drop. There was the end Elam for the main game. There were captains to choose their team, whatever their affiliation to the conference. Blake Griffin jumped once over a car.
But the decline continued. The recent games ended with final scores which made a farce of the idea that it was a real competition, harshly disputed, yourself, 211-186, 184-175, 163-160, 170-150 .. .
A team has not been held at less than 140 points since 2013, when the East was 138 years old. And they lost.
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This competitive decrease has also extended to other events. The Slam Dunk competition rarely presents the talent of a marquee of the league. Last year, Anthony Edwards, a right, drew on left -handers during the skills challenge. While the 3-point shooting may have been the best event of the weekend in recent years, the League has always felt the need to put Steph Curry against the Sabrina Ionescu of the WNBA last year-an event suddenly removed this time.
“We were unable to land on a plan that we thought we were raising the bar of the special moment of last year,” said NBA spokesman Mike Bass this week. “We have all agreed not to do it and we will rather emphasize the new Sunday star format.”
Something is missing here and has been missing for a long time. The league clearly knows it, seeking repeatedly to find a solution.
Take it SLAM DUNK competition. He has missed the vineyard, going from a cultural force to something almost clumsy in his horror. With all the respect of Mac McClung, winner of the last two Slam Dunk competitions, if he is one of the faces of your All-Star game weekend, you have big problems.
It is difficult for an NBA brand event to be marked when he continues to win by someone who is not, in fact, an NBA player.
And this year, McClung’s three peat path will have to go through … Matas Buzelis, Stephon Castle and Andre Jackson Jr.
None of this is McClung’s fault, neither his competitors, nor that of Adam Silver. You can trace the disappearance of the Slam Dunk competition – and perhaps all the slowness of the weekend – at the start of the LeBron James era.
Michael Jordan won the Dunk competition twice, once defeating Dominique Wilkins. This tradition of the big stars of the game continued a decade later when Kobe Bryant won the competition as a recruit. But LeBron never contributed, once the restraint after having finally agreed to lend his star to the procedure.
When the most important voice of the game says that something does not matter in the NBA, this is not the case. And rarely has since.
In addition, by coincidence or not, as the Slam Dunk competition fell in importance, the weekend as a whole and the competitiveness of the All-Star game itself. We have slipped into a state of carelessness of the players and a kind of fans’ non-record.
The days of Jordan wanting to freeze Kobe, or even a sufficiently frantic spirit of competitiveness that saw Dwyane Wade Breaking Kobe’s nose in the 2012 stars’ play, has been over for a long time.
All this brings us to this weekend and yet another format: a bizarre, still new, and, yes, potentially lame. But at least Silver tries something – a recognition that this weekend does not work this case and that the league, at least, tries to solve this problem.
On Sunday, the 24 All-Stars, now divided into three teams, as well as the winner of Rising Stars Challenge, will compete in a mini tournament with four teams.
Will it work? Will fans and players respond to the Chuck team, the Kenny team, the Shaq team and the Candace team? Is a team with LeBron, Steph and Kevin Durant – Team Shaq! – Go to wake up the public and make this event important as it did once?
Maybe. Probably not. But at least the league tries something. It is the same spirit of creativity that led to the tournament in the season (a victory, in my opinion) and the game tournament (a game changer).
Maybe the Rising Stars team, full of hungry young players having a chance to prove something against their older and more successful colleagues, will trigger enough competition juices on both sides of the equation for the All- game Star feels big, important, important, and still cool.
Or maybe the next stars who are currently standing up in the League, guys like Victor Wembanyama and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, will turn away from this time of All-Star We-Not-Care games and will channel Jordan’s days And Kobe – By winning, even a mid -season exhibition match, counted.
The weekend of the NBA stars game will not be saved. But someone new, beyond the greats of that time that let us come to this point, will have to try something.
