2025 Nba Star game was a disappointmentAnd this has become the norm in recent years. While the 2025 event was tainted by presentation problems and frequent stops, the redesigned format is the result of bad efforts of the players in 2024 and the few previous seasons. After another disappointing showcase, fans and criticisms wonder how one of the regular seasonal events has fallen so far.
The old center of the NBA Brendan Haywood has a theory. During an appearance on Triple Threat with Ashley Nicole Moss on CBS Sports Network, he argued that the decline had started in 2017, the year after Kobe Bryant’s retirement.
“I think it starts with the faces of the league,” said Haywood. “Do you want to know why the star match was so good in the 90s? Michael Jordan took the seriousness. The face of the league establishes the temperature of what the league will be. If the LeBron, if the one you think is being The face of the League at the moment, whether Ant-Man, be weby, whether it is Joker, Jayson Tatum, if these guys entered and said: “ ` Yo, we play hard ”, so that’s what everyone is going to do.
“You know when the quality of the All-Star game really started to drop? When Kobe Bryant retired. He kept the standard. Hey listening, Kobe Bryant broke his nose in the game of stars. And comes With him because there was a level of competitiveness and Kobe has always been like, hey, I have to wear the coat that Michael Jordan gave it to me.
Haywood played 13 seasons in the NBA, and he was Jordan’s teammate on Wizards for his first two years in the League.
Although the effort is not exactly measurable, the quality of the game of the stars has certainly decreased since the retreat of Bryant. The best star match since then came in 2020, which was played less than a month after the death of Bryant. Commissioner Adam Silver renamed the MVP All-Star trophy after Bryant, and a certain number of players have apparently played hard to try to win it. Kawhi Leonard finally ended up doing it.
The face of the league at the same time and probably during the Bryant career has been LeBron James, but in recent years, he has apparently invested less energy in the games of the stars than in the past. Aside from the 2022 match played in his hometown of Cleveland, James did not play 20 minutes in a star match this decade. He recently got into the habit of arriving for the star weekend, often on Saturday evening, and this season, he chose to sit out of the match with discomfort of the feet and ankle.
LeBron James des Lakers is missing the first NBA stars match in 21 years with “ankle and feet discomfort”
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The future of stars’ game is uncertain. The format has now changed three years in a row, and next season, it will have a new broadcaster in NBC. Fortunately, the player was much expected to take James’ coat like the face of the League, Victor Wembanyama, played hard on Sunday in his first star match. Hopefully this was preserving the effort around the league in the coming years.