Karalis: TNT ignored the basketball and put the spotlight on themselves, and put on the worst All-Star broadcast ever

We should have known this was going to be a bizarre weekend after the San Antonio Spurs team finished their Skills Challenge run. 

Victor Wembanyama and Chris Paul tried to game the system, hoping to win the meaningless event, by flicking three balls off the rack instead of shooting them from three spots on the floor. 

The whole point of the event was supposed to see who could pass, dribble, and shoot their way through a course the fastest, but Paul and Wembanyama were just focused on being the fastest. If NBA players had put this level of competitiveness into playing the game, I probably wouldn’t be writing this piece. 

The Spurs got disqualified for their stunt. If only the same had been done to the TNT production crew. 

After a long run-up of people complaining about a gimmicky tournament format and players who just need to try to make All-Star great again, the league was ready to prove it was capable of putting on a good, modern product. All-Star Saturday ended up being fine. People love the 3-point shootout and Mac McClung jumped over a car (like for real, not just the hood of it). It wasn’t great, but a good Sunday would be enough to at least inspire hope for the event’s future. 

But TNT didn’t get the memo. Instead of pointing cameras at the court and talking about basketball, they put the spotlight on themselves in a three-hour, self-congratulatory spectacle that treated the basketball as an interruption. Fans were pushed aside so anything but the game could take center stage. 

Did the TV schedule say 8 p.m.? Tough. You got 40 minutes of preamble. 

Was the basketball looking good? Tough. You got Kevin Hart interrupting the game and complaining about big men shooting 3-pointers. 

Were you intrigued after the first game showed promise of better effort? Tough. You got Draymond Green angrily denigrating the inclusion of the Rising Stars as the fourth team every chance he got. 

And when we got through it all and got to a championship game, did we finally get to watch some good basketball from two engaged teams full of the NBA’s best talent? 

Hahahaha, no. They stopped the game for 20 minutes so TNT could pat themselves on the back some more. The most iconic photo from Sunday night was the Inside the NBA crew standing on the court in fishing gear.

“I don’t know if the other guys knew (it was happening). I didn’t know,” Jaylen Brown said of the stoppage. “That kind of took the gas out of everything for a little bit.” 

When the camera switched onto Brown mid-ceremony, he looked straight in the lens and said “get ‘em outta here,” which should have been enough to earn him the MVP. 

But this is all fitting in a lot of ways. Inside the NBA has long put their own schtick ahead of the basketball on any given night, so why do it live? They clearly have thought what they do is bigger than the game for a while, so why not upstage a signature NBA moment so they can remind us all how much more important they are than the basketball we’re watching?

The only thing Sunday night did was make me happy TNT lost their contract with the NBA. I went to bed begging NBC to get it right next season and get back to showcasing and celebrating the game. 

The league had hit on something with its new tournament format, but by interrupting the game for a clown show, it turned the ending into a circus. 

“The format was cool,” Jayson Tatum said. “I think the toughest part, they stopped the game to do the presentation while we were kind of halfway through it. We were sitting down for 20 minutes, whatever it was. It was kind of tough to get back into the game after that … if they could just find a way to not have that long intermission in between the games or during the game, I think it would be a lot better.”

Strip away all the extraneous stuff and All-Star weekend was actually not that bad. I don’t mind the skills challenge, especially as a first event on Saturday. The 3-point shootout should be the closer because that's the event that most consistently delivers. The dunk contest, aside from McClung, might have reached its denouement. That's something the league needs to look at closely. Maybe replace it with a one-on-one tournament or something. 

The games on Sunday mostly delivered, at least on a proof of concept. The arguments against the rising stars are not without merit, so there's room to tweak that. I still think expanding the rosters to 15 on each side and then creating six teams of five players who play shorter games is the way to go if we’re doing a tournament format. Maybe adding some consolation games will help so fans get to see everyone more than once and the networks can fill their three-hour windows and make sponsors happy. 

There's meat on this bone for the NBA to work with, but unfortunately, that's not the conversation being had today. The big topic right now is how TNT put on the worst NBA All-Star broadcast of all time, mostly so they could tell us all how great a job they’ve done over the years. 

They approached Sunday like they were bigger than the game, and they overshadowed what could have been the beginning of a turnaround for the weekend. 

“Yeah, breaks, I guess, weren't ideal,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. “I would rather play without breaks. But I had fun nonetheless. I feel like it was a little bit more towards the competitive side tonight, which is a good feeling. A step in the right direction.

“I guess it's up to the guys that handle all that stuff to figure out what's next and how to keep making it more and more interesting, and hopefully we get there one day.”

Maybe with TNT gone, we will.