The East team, lead by captain Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, right, hoists the trophy after defeating the West 211-186 in the NBA All-Star basketball game in Indianapolis, Sunday, Feb. 18, 2024.
I tried to stay away from marching in the NBA All-Star Game disparagement parade, but the players simply wouldn’t let me.
The beautiful sport, featuring the most graceful athletes, was shamed by the display Sunday.
Unlike much of the feigned distress on social media, NBA All-Star Game outrage is real. So real that every year it resurfaces with renewed vigor.
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The mess we saw Sunday — well, some of us — was as bad as it has been.
ROCKETS AT THE BREAK: Get with the program.
This can’t be fixed.
I didn’t have to watch it live to be disgusted. Half the game on replay was enough to convince me the naysayers were right.
The West scored 186 points, yet they were blown out by 25 points. The East posted a record 211 points in a 48-minute game.
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Commissioner Adam Silver was so unimpressed that he failed to muster any enthusiasm in the postgame trophy ceremony.
“And to the Eastern Conference All-Stars, you scored the most points,” Silver said with a sigh. “Well … congratulations.”
This was hardly the lowest point for the NBA but certainly as deep as the All-Star Game has ever been.
Look, the game hasn’t been good for a long time. “How to Fix the NBA All-Star Game” columns have been being written for some 20 years. I’m not writing one.
The annual celebration of the sport has gone from being a showcase of the best athletes on the planet, to an exciting layup drill that at least turned serious in the last half of the fourth quarter, to a 3-point shootaround and an open-invitation-to-dunk contest.
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Jeff Van Gundy, the former Rockets coach and NBA TV analyst, called for the elimination of the game five years ago when the two teams combined to take 167 3-pointers and no one even made a veiled attempt to play defense.
RELATED: Generational shooters in Steph Curry and Sabrina Ionescu.
“The equivalent would be like Major League Baseball, a guy hits the ball, you (pitch) it to him at 70 mph because you’re not trying,” Van Gundy said. “And then you hit it, and no one chases it, and you just let a guy circle (the bases) and score, and you have unlimited runs. You’ve got to try.”
Van Gundy went off on that game, which had players giving enough defensive effort to commit 15 fouls.
On Sunday, 24 players committed three fouls.
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Not three fouls each. Three fouls total. And not a single foul in the fourth quarter, when, you know, the outcome of the game is supposed to matter.
Y’all probably don’t remember the time Hakeem Olajuwon fouled out of an All-Star Game.
It was in 1987, the first year Olajuwon was voted in as a starter, ending a long run of starts by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and pitting Olajuwon against his mentor Moses Malone. It was also Julius “Dr. J” Erving’s final All-Star Game.
When I asked Olajuwon, who had 13 rebounds and three blocked shots in the game, how he could foul out of an All-Star Game, he shook his head and laughed.
“We took it seriously back then,” he said.
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Those were the days.
Today we get Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić running a half-hearted fast break, giggling like middle schoolers faking a figure-eight drill because their coaches weren’t watching. Except millions of fans were.
The league says the game drew 11.6 million unique viewers, a 20% jump over last year’s game, and 2 million more viewers than the average game of the recent Rangers-Diamondbacks World Series.
For a game that was hardly representative of the sport.
“Obviously, it wasn’t high intensity at all,” said Tyrese Haliburton, whose 32 points were the fourth most by a player in the game.
After the Pro Bowl turned into a touch football game with little touching, the NFL ditched it completely.
The NHL has tweaked its competition so much that nobody expects hockey to be played, because its All-Star game was as physical as the Ice Capades.
Baseball is baseball. With injuries much less of a concern, MLB All Stars can still play what looks like a real game. Still, the league made a ridiculous tweak from 2003-2016 that granted home-field advantage in the World Series to the team from the league that won the midsummer classic.
What can the NBA do?
Larry Bird called on the players to give some competitive effort to show off the NBA on Sunday, but they didn’t.
Michael Jordan chose to pay a $10,000 fine and play golf instead of attending mandatory Friday media sessions in the All-Star cities. But he showed up on game day ready to play.
That was a different league with different players. There weren’t as many friends among players, and the competition was far less friendly.
Those guys wanted to beat those guys. These guys don’t want to hurt these guys.
While money was at stake back then, family fortunes weren’t on the line.
This money is just as earned, but current superstars are paid more in a couple seasons than Olajuwon made in his entire 18-year career.
Even adjusted for inflation, that’s too much to risk in a midseason exhibition, so you can’t blame them for protecting themselves. But it’s hard to watch.
I hate the game, not the players.
“The good thing that came out of tonight is none of the players were injured,” LeBron James said after the game. “Everybody came out unscathed.”
Every player, yes, but not the NBA.
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