Quit whining about the NBA All-Star Game
The league innovated because innovation was demanded
The NBA is super insecure. This is absolutely correct.
And I think the problem goes deeper than just the All-Star Game. I mean, you have a major throughline right now that the NBA on TNT team is too mean to the NBA. It is not healthy for the league’s premier studio show to criticize the product, goes the thinking. (The thinking stops ironically there and does not continue to whether it is healthy for a plurality of NBA writers to criticize the NBA’s premier studio show.)
This editorial (authored by the skeeter above) aptly recaps most of the grousings that are increasingly ubiquitous in the NBA content world. I don’t actually have a problem with the editorial insofar as it is one person’s well-reasoned opinion.
However, every Thursday, my (Bluesky — not Twitter) timeline is inundated with the bitching and moaning who hate-watch what is the gold standard in sports TV studio production, that being Inside the NBA with Ernie, Chuck, Shaq and Kenny.
Dubin is a principle cheerleader in decrying the Inside crew. He is also, quite clearly, too close to see it.
Dubin is a good writer, a good poster, and a good parser of the finer points of NBA basketball, particularly in the realm of statistics and analytics. He is also someone that I find myself disagreeing with like 80% of the time he voices a sports opinion. Anyway, he has made his career championing the things that Chuck and Shaq routinely criticize about the modern game, the increased 3-point shooting and the league’s competitiveness, and is routinely disgusted by the Inside crew’s lack of knowledge of fringe NBA players, and who they play for.
He’s also not the only one. Plenty of prestige bloggers routinely trash the show. The All-Star Game piloted a new format this year, and the shift gave haters all the ammunition they could dream of.
Well, I have bad news for everyone above which is that the All-Star Game was giving you what you, the bitchers, wanted.
It directly addressed concerns around competitiveness by staging a four-team tournament. It limited concerns for being too much for players to commit to in an exhibition by lessening the number of minutes they were asked to play. It replaced much of that hated-upon, meaningless basketball content with alternative entertainment, including top-3 most famous comedian in the world Kevin Hart as emcee. They had a segment hosted by MrBeast, a YouTuber with 363 million subscribers. And yes, it leveraged the personalities of its 21-time Emmy-winning show, Inside the NBA, to maximum effect.
This is the trouble with All-Star games. The product begins to decline, the way the quality of work in any industry has declined since we all got cell phones, and then the ideas to fix it are scattershot, and while no one can agree on what to change it to, we all seem to agree that change itself sucks.
The way the larger conversation of the NBA’s image problem and the specific flashpoint of this specific All-Star Game intertwine should not be overlooked. They are rooted in a perceived lack of efficacy.
What effect is the 3-point revolution and the routine resting of top stars and the perceive lack of competitiveness having on the game? It’s making regular season basketball less efficacious.
When the show that is supposed to be promoting the game of basketball is leveeing criticisms against the league it covers, it is not fulfilling its obligations with efficacy.1
What is the definition of efficacy in context of an All-Star Game? What do we want out of it. The critics pine for some celestial bout of the best basketball talent in the world. The NBA landed on something that is fun. Here’s basketball, but since the basketball has gotten boring in the past, here’s Kevin Hart and MrBeast and Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley.
The correct answer for what result do we rely on the All-Star Game to produce may elude us forever. I think we’d all love a full-throttle competitive basketball game. I think the data shows us that isn’t happening. In lieu of that, an appetizer of reasonably competitive hoops with some awards-show-style self-aggrandization and a dash of celebrity to sell advertisements is only fair to expect. It wasn’t perfect. There are several minor tweaks that could improve upon the new format. But of course, level-headedness isn’t why we log on to social media to opine.
It may be the point of the All-Star Game is to craft a product that people talk about. That objective was certainly accomplished.
Just wish ya’ll weren’t so whiny about it.
The reverse would be much worse, though. We really don’t want a declining product coupled with a studio show that says the game is improving.