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.
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.
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.
Despite this tendency, however, the league’s leadership regularly alters its All-Star Weekend program in an (often ineffective) effort to encourage competitive play.
The complaints are persistent, well-documented, and mainly attributed to a single factor: players’ lack of effort.
