My plan to fix the NBA All-Star game

It probably won’t work. But I’m yet another man with a plan.

A G League player dunks over a passenger automobile.

I was about to publish this story before I got caught up in some errands that took longer than I expected. In the interim, Ethan Sherwood Strauss — who I got to hang out with in San Francisco for the festivities this weekend — published a story with the headline “Just Stop Fixing the NBA All-Star Game.”

Ethan argues that the constant tweaks the league has made to the game just haven’t worked. I’m holding out a little more hope.

The last time I’d attended an NBA All-Star game before San Francisco was five years earlier, in Chicago. That 2020 event was memorable for two reasons. First, it was in that liminal phase where everyone sort of knew it was a bad idea to hang out in large crowds but was in denial about it, one of the last big gatherings before the country started to shut down for COVID. And second, it was the last good All-Star Game.

That year featured the introduction of the Elam Ending, where teams competed toward a final target score instead of against the clock. That particular gimmick actually worked pretty well — for one year. The last several possessions featured NBA basketball that actually looked like competitive NBA basketball — with fouls and all that! — as Team LeBron outpaced Team Giannis 157-155 to hit the target.

But the reawakening of the All-Star Game was short-lived, another bit of nostalgia from the “before times.” I mentioned before that 2020 featured a lot of fouls — 35 to be exact. Wait, fouls are a good thing? Sure, nobody goes to the arena to see free throws. But they’re a tangible sign of defensive effort. And the 35 fouls were the most in an ASG since 2006. They’ve fallen in every subsequent season, however. There were just 3 personal fouls in last year’s game, for instance. The result? The East won 211-186; a score that looks like a glitch.

It didn’t used to be like this. Good offense generally dominates good defense in the NBA, so final scores will always be high when All-Star scorers are competing against one another. But Hakeem Olajuwon actually fouled out of the 1987 game at Seattle’s Kingdome, for instance. And up until the mid-90s, the number of fouls in the All-Star Game closely mirrored the regular season numbers. No ASG since 1993 has featured more fouls than the regular season average, however — 2020, the closest thing to an exception, now looks like an outlier.

The lackluster play of recent seasons has led to calls to scrap the All-Star Game entirely. But as Ethan suggests, that probably isn’t going to happen. There are all sorts of meetings and parties associated with the game; it’s a way for the league to entrench its relationships with corporate sponsors and to reward teams for building shiny new arenas, like Chase Center in San Francisco. Still, except for that one-off in Chicago, nothing the league has tried — from player drafts to Elam Endings — has really worked.

This year featured the most radical experiment of all: a four-team tournament, with games played to target scores of 40 points. Essentially, the 24 All-Stars were divided into a World Team, an “OG” team of veteran American stars, and a “Young Stars” team of mid-career American players. (The math didn’t work out perfectly; Donovan Mitchell — born in Elmsford, New York — was on the World team, for instance.)

The concept had some promise. The relatively short time frame for each game — it doesn’t take long to reach 40 points under All-Star conditions — in theory might yield better effort. And the second semifinal between the OGs and the “Rising Stars” team — not to be confused with the “Young Stars” — was fun to watch for spurts. Sure, the Rising Stars, a cohort of first- and second-year players, weren’t actually All-Stars or really stars at all. Led by Stephon Castle and Dalton Knecht — a rookie whom the Lakers tried to trade only to have the deal rescinded a few days later — the Rising Stars would probably go something like 26-56 in the regular season. And here they were, playing against the likes of Steph Curry, Jayson Tatum and Kevin Durant. But at least they hustled and ran something resembling defensive sets before the OGs — sensing a potentially embarrassing defeat — pulled decisively ahead.

But the final was marred by the OGs jumping out to a quick 11-1 lead over the World + Elmsford, NY team — and then a momentum-killing 20-minute pause to honor the crew of Inside the NBA. If you’re trying to get the players to take the game more seriously, this surely didn’t send the right signal. Nor, for that matter, did a Slam Dunk Contest highlighted by Mac McClung — a G League player who has played all of five regular season minutes for the Orlando Magic this season — jumping over a Kia. However spectacular it was — and it was spectacular — it was a spectacle and not NBA basketball.

There’s momentum now for a World versus America format, which is probably worth trying for a season or two. Although the Americans are deeper, the past six MVPs are international players, and the odds-on favorite to win this year’s MVP — Canada’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — is too. But, the NHL adopted a World versus North America format for five seasons between 1998 and 2002 and then abandoned it. Even in a climate of rising tension between America and its allies, it’s not like players from, say, Greece, Canada, Cameroon and Serbia are necessarily going to have all that much camaraderie.¹

Plus, NBA players are smart businessmen, and they’ve preseumably solved for the equilibrium. As Strauss notes, players have all sorts of media and sponsorship obligations over All-Star Weekend; those distractions undoubtedly don’t help. And the one thing you absolutely do not want to do is get hurt in an All-Star game and jeopardize your next $200 million contract or $50 million shoe deal. Absent that, the biggest risk is getting posterized or embarrassed somehow. So why bother playing defense at all rather than take that chance?

Even if the players had more downtime and some sort of insurance clause from the league in the event of All-Star-induced injury, the one thing I learned from interviewing dozens of highly competitive risk-takers for my book is that you can’t fake a high-stakes environment. Our bodies have a physical response to stress, and professional athletes are fun to watch in part because — except for Ben Simmons — they’re well-adapted to it, able to reach for something extra in the tank in the moments that matter most. But once your body and mind finally have a pause to relax in the midst of a very long NBA season — the players do plenty of partying during All-Star Weekend, too — it’s hard to pull your way back into mental game shape. The stakes are low, meanwhile. The financial incentives the league offered to tournament winners this year are nice by normal-person standards — but paltry compared to the millions that the league’s top players are pulling down annually.

So why not just give up and treat the ASG as a fun weekend that is almost certain to be a letdown from a basketball standpoint?

A 3-on-3 tournament — with a twist

Well, because you have 24 of the best basketball players in the world gathered together. I’m a stubborn guy, and I just can’t get over the fact that it seems like a wasted opportunity. So here’s my contribution to the sad let’s-save-the-All-Star game genre.

It incorporates some elements the league has tried before — a draft, and a tournament. But it’s intended to take players out of their comfort zone and have them compete for something they actually might care about — personal pride.

I’m not the first NBA fan to notice that, since there are 24 All-Stars, you could divide them into eight teams of three players each, setting up a potential 3-on-3 bracket. My twist is that All-Stars from the same team would be paired together as much as possible. That’s going to introduce two favorable elements. First, some degree of chemistry — imagine LeBron and Luka playing together with a third wheel next season (Kyrie Irving?) after a season under their belt with the Lakers. And second, again, an element of pride. The Cavaliers, for instance, have three All-Stars this year — the only team with this distinction — but haven’t gotten much respect despite their 44-10 record. So Donovan Mitchell, Darius Garland, and Evan Mobley would have much to prove in a 3-on-3 tournament, taking on gauntlets of other stars.

Here’s the plan. Teams would be seeded #1 through #8 using the following tiers:

• First, any team with three or more All-Stars would be among the top seeds, with ties broken by the highest number of fan votes for the top vote-getter on the team — this player serves as the captain. If a team has more than three All-Stars — this is rare, but it happens — the lowest-ranked players in the fan vote would go into the draft pool instead.

• Next, any team with two All-Stars, ranked by the highest number of fan votes for the team’s top vote-getter.

• And third, singleton teams. These players have captains who are the only All-Star on their teams. Again, we’d go by the fan vote in ranking the squads, though players named All-Star starters by the league always get priority over reserves.

The remaining All-Stars go into the draft pool. We’d follow a snake draft format, so the 8th seed chooses first in Round 2, and then we’d wrap back around and pick from top to bottom in Round 3. Here’s how it would look this year.²

So, we start with one complete team — the Cavs — followed by four duos and three singletons. How might the draft go from there?

Let’s be quick with this. Durant has the first pick in Round 1 and of course chooses his former teammate, Curry — and LeBron reciprocates by reuniting with Anthony Davis. Then Nikola Jokic elects to form a dynamic duo by pairing with Anthony Edwards.

The Cavs — formally Team Donovan — don’t need a pick at the top of Round 3 since they’re already complete. So the #2 seed, Team Giannis, picks next, and they say screw it and choose the best player on the board in Victor Wembanyama for the high-Scrabble-scoring tandem of Wembanyama and Antetokounmpo.

From this point onward, the talent level drops off, and “fit” becomes as important a consideration as anything else. So you’re no longer drafting players just for political reasons: in a 3-on-3 game, all your strengths and weaknesses will be exposed. The Celtics opt to add a big in Jaren Jackson, Jr. Then the Knicks’ Karl-Anthony Towns and Jalen Brunson choose Cade Cunningham to give them some size in the backcourt. SGA and Jalen Williams pick the closest Chet Holmgren approximation on the board in the form of Alperen Sengun. Jokic and Edwards add newly-crowned 3-Point Contest champion Tyler Herro. LeBron and AD pick another OG in James Harden. That leaves Pascal Siakam as the leftover for the reunited KD and Curry, who happens to be a logical enough fit. (In practice, there would probably be some behind-the-scenes negotiation/arm-twisting to ensure the teams are good thematically and well-balanced on the court.)

This … would at least be fun, right? Look at the first matchup, where the #1 seeded Cavs take on #8 Steph and KD (and Siakam). The four opening-round games would be played on Saturday, along with the Slam Dunk Contest. Then the two semi-final games on Sunday, followed by the 3-Point Contest to give everyone a break, and the final.

You could decide whether to play by Olympic 3x3 rules or regulation NBA rules or some hybrid thereof — I’m not sure it matters much. But you’d play to a target score, with the idea being that you’d get about a quarter’s worth of basketball in each game. The goal is that all 24 All-Stars get some exposure — there’s no hiding when you’re playing 3-on-3.³

And sure, some of the teams would take it more seriously than others, but that’s part of the beauty of the tournament format. The loafers get ousted and hit the nightclubs on Saturday; the teams that advance to Sunday are probably going for gold (and some sort of monetary prize that could be more lucrative since it would only need to be divided three ways). I honestly don’t know who the favorites would be, but if you forced me to set odds, I’d probably go something like this, accounting for a bit of home-court advantage for Team KD/Curry:

​​Team Giannis +350

Team Jokic +350

Team KD +500

Team Donovan +600

Team KAT +1000

Team LeBron +1000

Team SGA +1200

Team Tatum +1500

Let me know in the comments which team you’d bet on — and whether this plan is just as hopeless as all the others.

1. By contrast, the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off — with full teams from the US, Canada, Sweden, and Finland — has drawn spectacular reviews. But the NBA doesn’t have that sort of geographic diversity. After Giannis Antetokounmpo, the next most accomplished player from Greece in league history is … his brother Thanasis, who has averaged 2.4 PPG over parts of six seasons. I’d rather see McClung out there, who could at least provide some spectacular dunks.

2. For this article, I’m going to go with the players that were initially named as All-Stars and ignore injury replacements — since this is hypothetical anyway, I’m going to wish away those injuries. If there were a need for a last-minute replacement, teams could select players from the Rising Stars pool.

3. If you wanted to provide each team with an injury replacement from the Futures Game, I suppose I’m OK with that, but I’d want strict limits on how these 4th men could be used. If you don’t want to play, LeBron, please let the league office know ahead of time.