SAN FRANCISCO — Let’s give Adam Silver and the NBA this much credit: They’re trying, at least, to try and salvage the NBA All-Star Game.
This isn’t an easy task. The All-Star Game and its constellation of events haven’t been a consistently culturally relevant or successful sporting event for a long time. The NHL canceled its own All-Star Game this year, and the NFL’s Pro Bowl is so meaningless you may have missed its very existence a couple of weeks ago.
But the slow, tortured demise of the NBA’s version feels particularly painful because of what has been lost. This weekend used to matter — from the Slam Dunk Contest, to the storylines that bubbled up, to the game itself.
There was a time when this was a marquee moment for the sport, an engine for the NBA to sell itself to the public, and a showcase for hoops liberated from the NFL’s nearly year-round dominance.
Now it’s a dud.
The recent versions have barely risen above the increasing din in American life, where breaking through is much, much harder than it was a decade or two ago. Even if it is — and has not been — a compelling product.
The league has tried many things to reverse the decline. There was the Elam ending for the main game. There was having captains pick their team, regardless of conference affiliation. Blake Griffin once jumped over a car.
But the decline has continued. Recent games have ended in final scores that made a farce of the idea of this being an actual, hard-fought, you-must-watch competition: 211-186, 184-175, 163-160, 170-150 …
A team hasn’t been held to less than 140 points since 2013, when the East had 138. And they lost.
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This competitive decay has extended to other events, too. The Slam Dunk Contest rarely features the league’s marquee talent. Last year, Anthony Edwards, a righty, shot left-handed during the skills challenge. While the 3-point Shootout has perhaps been the weekend’s best event the past few years, the league still felt the need to pit Steph Curry against the WNBA’s Sabrina Ionescu last year — an event abruptly scrapped this time around.
“We weren’t able to land on a plan we thought would raise the bar off of last year’s special moment,” NBA spokesman Mike Bass said this week. “We all agreed not to proceed and will instead keep the focus on All-Star Sunday’s new format.”
Something is missing here and has been missing for a long time. The league clearly knows it, searching time and again to find a fix.
Take the Slam Dunk Contest. It has shriveled on the vine, shifting from a cultural force to something almost awkward in its awfulness. With all respect to Mac McClung, winner of the last two Slam Dunk Contests, if he’s one of the faces of your All-Star Game weekend, you’re in big trouble.
It is hard for a marquee NBA event to be marquee when it keeps getting won by someone who is not, in fact, an NBA player.
And this year, the path to McClung’s three-peat will have to go through … Matas Buzelis, Stephon Castle and Andre Jackson Jr.
None of this is McClung’s fault, nor his competitors, nor that of Adam Silver. You can trace the demise of the Slam Dunk Contest — and maybe the weekend’s entire sluggishness — back to the beginning of the LeBron James era.
Michael Jordan won the dunk contest twice, once besting Dominique Wilkins. That tradition of the game’s great, young stars continued a decade later when Kobe Bryant won the contest as a rookie. But LeBron never competed, once backing out after finally agreeing to lend his star to the proceedings.
When the game’s most important voice says something doesn’t matter in the NBA, it doesn’t. And rarely has since.
Plus, coincidentally or not, as the Slam Dunk Contest has receded in importance, so has the weekend as a whole and the competitiveness of the All-Star Game itself. We have slipped into a state of insouciance from the players and a kind of bored irrelevance from fans.
The days of Jordan wanting to freeze out Kobe, or even a frenzied enough competitiveness spirit that saw Dwyane Wade break Kobe’s nose in the 2012 All-Star Game, are long gone.
All of this brings us to this weekend and yet another format: One weird, again new, and, yes, potentially lame. But at least Silver is trying something — an acknowledgment that this weekend doesn’t work the way it used to and that the league, at a minimum, is trying to fix that.
On Sunday, the 24 All-Stars, now split into three teams, along with the winner of the Rising Stars Challenge, will face off in a four-team mini tournament.
Will it work? Will fans and players respond to Team Chuck, Team Kenny, Team Shaq, and Team Candace? Is a team featuring LeBron, Steph and Kevin Durant — Team Shaq! — going to rouse the public and make this event matter the way it once did?
Maybe. Probably not. But at least the league is trying something. This is the same spirit of creativity that led to the In-Season Tournament (a win, from my view) and the play-in tournament (a game changer).
Perhaps the Rising Stars team, full of young, hungry players with a chance to prove something against their older and more successful colleagues, will spark enough competitive juices on both sides of the equation to make the actual All-Star Game feel big, important, and cool again.
Or maybe the next stars who are actually rising right now in the league, guys like Victor Wembanyama and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, will turn away from this era of we-don’t-care All-Star Games and channel the days of Jordan and Kobe — when winning, even an exhibition game midseason, mattered.
NBA All-Star Game weekend won’t save itself. But somebody new, beyond this era’s greats who have let us get to this point, will have to try something.
