The NBA All-Star Game’s Descent into Sports Uncanny Valley Continues
Sunday's record-breaking scorefest was just the latest development in a long-running trend.
There’s going to be much hand-wringing this week about the NBA All-Star Game, which delivered a truly absurd amount of points on Sunday — the Eastern Conference set a record with 211 and both teams combined for 397 in total, shattering 2017’s previous record of 374 — but little in the way of excitement. (The East led by double-digits most of the game from the second quarter onward, not that it mattered.)
One can only hope it was the peak of the “more scoring is always better” mindset that seems to permeate the event — an attitude which has been tested to its limits and, I think we can all agree, failed. I side on this with
, who has argued before that wantonly blowing up the scoreboard with points can often be too much of a good thing. The NBA’s market research may have suggested that fans love scoring, but if you take it too far, you end up with a grotesque distortion of the sport.My favorite gauge for an All-Star event has always been to compare it to the “normal” version of the sport we usually get — and by that standard, the NBA All-Star Game is as much funhouse-mirror basketball as it’s ever been, even in a year with historically high levels of offense at baseline:
Incidentally, this is why I think MLB’s All-Star Game is the one that holds up best — it stays truest to the “real” version of the sport whose stars it’s supposed to be honoring.
And soon enough, the MLB All-Star Game might be the last of its kind. The NFL and NHL have already ditched traditional ASGs in favor of skills competitions and off-the-wall formats. And while the NBA seemed to signal a desire to return its ASG to former glories by restoring the East-versus-West format, that did little to keep the game from descending into an uncanny-valley version of the sport — one that sort of looks like basketball, but without most of the essential ingredients that make us love this game.
Truth is, the purpose of All-Star Games remains very much unclear in 2024. As I wrote in this Wall Street Journal chat from a few years ago:
Right now, all-star games mostly feel like throwbacks to a previous era of sports, when fans would generally only see stars from other teams when they passed through their city, and the idea of great players playing together was still novel. If there is a point anymore, it’s probably more about all the events around the game itself—the skill competitions and contests, and the players getting a chance to have fun with their friends from across the league. In fact, many all-star games have gradually changed to more resemble those events (in atmosphere if not in outright rules) than the other way around.
Nothing has changed since — if anything, All-Star Games are continuing to show a deep confusion over why they exist and what the goal of it all is.
Jaylen Brown told the truth when he said this: “Hopefully, as years go on, [the All-Star Game] gets back to being what the fans wanna see … I guess guys are trying to figure out how to play hard and be safe at the same time.”
But that may not be possible. We’re simply in a very different era from when these exhibitions were first created, and maybe each generation gets the All-Star Game it deserves. Leagues like the NBA can try to dress the ASG up to look like the old days, and try to argue for the “line goes up” theory that scoring equals entertainment. But they can’t make the game mean anything — and without that, things are destined to keep getting more and more absurd.
Filed under: NBA
There is so much nonsensical hand wringing about this event. You can’t manufacture intensity. Enjoy it for what it is - a game completely divorced from reality - or go the NHL route and play it as 3x3 with Olympic rules.