The NBA’s annual All-Star showcase is a critical weekend for the league. They spend three days showing off what the league has to offer in an effort to drum up excitement and bring in a few more casual fans. It’s a celebration of everything that makes the league great.
Except All-Star Saturday is a mess. Friday’s Rising Stars Challenge has been revamped and is fine. The Sunday All-Star game, with its new Elam ending, has the potential to be fun for a while. The one pre-pandemic attempt at it in Chicago was very well received.
Saturday, though? Saturday is broken. This year’s Saturday events were an abject failure. The need something to keep people engaged and interested. Here are some ideas for how to fix the events.
SKILLS COMPETITION
This is one has been the hardest to figure out. In theory, the original idea makes sense: Make a guy run through an obstacle course that tests their dribbling, passing, and shooting, time it, and the winner is the one who does it the fastest.
However, it’s not overly exciting. Guys didn’t seem to be trying very hard. The event has gone through a few tweaks, culminating in a three-team format this year that pitted rookies against Cleveland Cavaliers players (the event is in Cleveland) and the Antetokounmpo brothers.
It was alright, but it wasn’t showing off many skills. We want to see the best of the best show off what they do best. So let’s break this down into dribbling, shooting, and passing competitions.
Dribbling: Dribble Dribble Revolution
Look at this guy go…
Let’s borrow this idea but with dribbling. Mix all of the different dribbles into the machine, get guys to try to follow it for a minute with the moves coming faster and becoming more complicated as they go on. The guy with the most accurate score wins.
Shooting: Distance drill
Put :45 on the clock and put 7-8 spots on the floor, from layup to half court. Contestant starts at the layup and moves back every time he makes the shot. However, if he misses, he has to move up to the previous spot. So if you blow the 3-pointer, you have to step in and take the top of the key shot again. Miss that, and it’s back to the free throw. Whoever makes it out the furthest wins.
I’ll make no stopping a rule, which means if a guy cans a 35 footer, he can’t just stop there and not risk missing the half court shot. We can put a shot clock or something on each attempt and if you stall, you move closer.
Passing: Moving targets
It’s 2022, we can get a couple of moving targets out there. Set up some stationary targets that require fancier passes, then make them hit a streaking target up the sideline kind of like they do in the Pro Bowl quarterback competition.
THREE POINT CONTEST
This is a pretty straightforward competition, but they do need to make one tweak: passers instead of racks.
Having the racks there is like asking home run derby participants to hit off tees. This is an unnatural motion for shooters, so let’s do away with it.
Let’s have a coach or player from the skill competition hop in and just toss the ball to these guys so they can catch and shoot. We want to see the ball go in, right? Let’s make this a little more natural so we can see a few more shots fall.
DUNK CONTEST
This one is tough. The biggest problem is that we’ve been conditioned to think a lot of these dunks are pedestrian. The first time someone went between the legs on a dunk was monumental. Now guys do it all the time, so we’re not as thrilled by it.
Now guys are trying even more outrageous dunks that take a lot of tries to get down, and they're missing a lot. Watching all those missed attempts was brutal.
So I propose turning this into a game of H-O-R-S-E, but a little shorter. We can do P-I-G or call it D-U-N-K.
The concept is simple: The first guy tries a dunk. If he makes it, the next guy has to match it. If he does, then it goes on down the line until either someone misses or the first guy is back up again and has to try a new dunk. If someone misses, he gets a letter and the next guy tries a dunk.
It eliminates a guy trying the same dunk 10 times. It eliminates the scoring being subjective. It ups the anticipation of the next guy being able to match a made dunk, especially at the end.
I still think All-Star Saturday can work. Maybe these ideas will help, maybe they won’t, but whatever the answer, the NBA needs some more creative thinking to try to showcase the skills of their players. There's a way to do it, and last night wasn’t it.