NBA All-Star Game Doesn’t Need To Be ‘Fixed’

In the wake of the highest-scoring NBA All-Star Game in history, there have been cries from near and far to fix the game. News flash: It’s not broken.

The numbers were staggering Sunday night at Air Canada Centre in Toronto.

There were 369 points scored in Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game. The players combined to take 145 3-pointers among the 286 shot attempts that were jacked up.

Paul George of the Indiana Pacers threatened the All-Star Game scoring mark, finishing one point off Wilt Chamberlain’s record 42 set in the 1962 game played at St. Louis Arena.

George amassed his 41 points with nine 3-pointers (a record) on 19 attempts from deep (ditto).

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This has led to some gnashing of teeth in NBA circles, with many calls such as this one by Bill Livingston of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wanting to “fix” the All-Star Game.

If there’s a problem with the NBA All-Star Game, it is simply this: It tries to be too many things for too many people and if you were to ask 100 people what the NBA All-Star Game should be, you are going to get 100 different answers.

The constituents for the All-Star Game (us) do break down into some broad categories. However, these categories are not conducive in most cases to any sort of workable compromise.

The groups include:

The Purists: The NBA All-Star Game is a serious demonstration of who the league’s best players are for the half season just passed and should be played as such. There should be serious attention paid to defensive rotations, running proper offensive sets and it should be a hard-fought, competitive game.

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The Minute Maids: This is a new category that has cropped up within the last decade, comprised of basketball aficionados so wrapped up in limiting players’ minutes that their All-Star Game nirvana would involve 24 players sitting on the bench looking out at the ball resting on the court in order to prevent anyone from being injured from playing too much.

The Stans: These are the people who are not so much fans of any particular team so much as they are ardent followers of a particular player. Their dream All-Star experience would involve seeing their guy do all the ball-handling, passing, rebounding and scoring because, of course, no other player is worthy of doing so.

The Realists: The All-Star Game is part celebration of the game, part reward for the players and part money grab by the NBA. It is what it is. The players will take it as seriously as they need to in order to (a) put on a good show and (b) not screw up their bodies for the second half of the season and the playoffs.

The Nostradamus Society: These are the people who predict gloom and despair for the future of the NBA based on how the pace and style of play is conducted on All-Star Sunday. Because, you know, it’s easy to foresee a league where teams take 80 3-pointers a game in a regular-season contest, right?

The Casual Fan: This is the group the NBA and every other entity competing for the world’s entertainment dollar competes for the hardest, which is why every major event (read: Super Bowl et al) has devolved into a senses-numbing audio-visual orgasm trying to capture the attention of people who may be peripherally aware that there is a professional basketball league in North America.

It is the pursuit of this last group—the group that determines ratings success on television and, thus, future earnings from television rights—that gums up the works.

I’m an NBA fan from the days of late-career Wilt, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, when the new young stars had names such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving.

In other words, the amount of inducement I need to watch the NBA All-Star Game doesn’t involve concerts, celebrities, light shows, mascots running amok, a broadcast team consisting of a larger number of people than it took for the Allies to win on D-Day or fancy uniforms that can cause retinal bleeding.

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But I realize it’s a minority position—with so many entertainment options available and so much at stake for the league, the NBA is just about forced to try and add as many different things as possible in order to get eyeballs staring at flat screens.

There was a time when coaches ran their All-Star teams like they were legitimately trying to win. Some guys played 35-38 minutes, others might see only four or five.

Can you imagine the howls of outrage that would ensue today from the fan base of a team whose star logged 36 minutes in an All-Star Game?

And yet there are complaints every year that the game is not competitive enough, the players don’t try hard enough and there is no attempt at playing anything resembling defense.

But here’s the thing, and it’s really no more complex than this: The same voices complaining about the current All-Star Game would find other things to complain about if some players played too much, others didn’t play enough and, God forbid, someone sprained an ankle fighting over a pick (or worse).

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The All-Star Game is fine. It is what it is. Perhaps the best thing we as fans can do is sit back, relax and just enjoy the show while bearing in mind that the style of play is not going to be the future of the league.