Oh, you thought we were done sending players to new teams? Think again. The 2025 NBA trade deadline may have passed, and several of the league’s most famous players may have new homes, but now we get to figure out who they’ll play for in San Francisco for the 2025 All-Star… Game? Games? Tournament?
As a reminder, the All-Star format has changed once again this season. Rather than East vs. West or a draft featuring two captains, this year’s 24 All-Stars will be divided into three teams drafted by the cast of Inside the NBA: Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal. Those three teams will play in a tournament that will also include the winner of the Rising Stars Challenge on All-Star Friday. So on Thursday, the captains picked their squads and we now have our three All-Star teams.
2025 NBA All-Star Game draft results
If you’re sensing a theme here, well, you’re correct. Two of our three captains decided to build teams around a specific concept. Barkley went for international players. His only American is Donovan Mitchell, and that’s because no more foreign-born players were available in the last round. O’Neal leaned towards older legends. Brown and Tatum are the only players on his team under the age of 30. Smith simply took the guys who were left, though he made a note of saying during several picks that he wanted to reward winning.
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Jasmyn Wimbish
Whether this was planned by the captains or purely incidental, the rosters here work out perfectly for the NBA. Critics of prior All-Star Games have called for the league to try a Team USA vs. Team World format. Logistically, doing so would create some complications, but these rosters can essentially serve as a backdoor trial for that concept. Notably, every member of O’Neal’s roster has played for Team USA in some international competition, and five of them played in the 2024 Olympics.
The obvious danger to this approach, just by looking at the rosters, is how unbalanced Barkley’s team is. Mitchell and Gilgeous-Alexander are his only guards, and Mitchell is notably American. That’s going to force the big men to handle the ball more. Of course, given the specific big men involved here, they’ll likely be just fine.
