Nearly 50 years after it adopted the slam dunk contest from the ABA, perhaps it’s time to once again for the NBA to look outward for a solution to its perpetual All-Star problem.
To paraphrase a Nobel laureate on the perennial crises facing another form of live entertainment, the NBA All-Star Game is an institution that has been dying for 70 years but has yet to succumb. The complaints are persistent, well-documented, and mainly attributed to a single factor: players’ lack of effort. An absence of defensive activity, in particular, is said to make All-Star Games almost unwatchable.
For some players, the lack of effort is not an accident – the game falls in the middle of the NBA’s All-Star Break, a six-day pause in competitive play that serves as the only meaningful time off during the league’s 82-game regular season. Indeed, many of the players not named to All-Star teams use the break to go on holiday. Despite this tendency, however, the league’s leadership regularly alters its All-Star Weekend program in an (often ineffective) effort to encourage competitive play.
