After the 2024 NBA All-Star debacle, which saw the annual game’s typical lack of defense hit new heights of non-effort by the players, league officials realized they had to do something. Throughout the 74-year history of the NBA’s mid-winter spectacle, scoring has generally been higher, often much higher, than in competitive in-season games. But last year’s game was seen by fans, league officials and perhaps even players as simply ridiculous.
For the first time, one team raced past the previously unreachable 200-point mark. That was the East All-Star squad who defeated the West by an eye-popping score of 211-186. The East point total shattered the previous All-Star game record of 196 set by the West team in the 2016 All-Star game.
For that matter, the West team’s 2024 losing total of 186 — led by 50 from Karl-Anthony Towns in just 28 minutes — was the fourth-highest in NBA All-Star history.
Lackluster Play Sparked Revamped All-Star Format
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was up front in expressing his dissatisfaction with game, and added that “there’s no doubt that the players were disappointed as well.” The league, Silver said, must “do a better job providing competition and entertainment for our fans.”
The result: a completely revamped format in which All-Star weekend, held this year at Chase Center in San Francisco, California, home of the Golden State Warriors, consists of not one game but four. But will it work? The new format has at least one All-Star confused. Jaylen Brown of the reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics — making the fourth All-Star appearance of his nine year career — was asked on Saturday for his take on the revamped All-Star event.
In response, he delivered a brutally honest, seven-word answer.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” the 28-year-old, who was the Celtics first-round draft pick, No. 3 overall, out of California in 2016, declared.
Brown was then asked if he believes that the new format will cause All-Star players to compete more seriously in what is now an All-Star tournament.
“I guess we’ll see,” Brown said. “I don’t know, we’ll see.”
So what is going on?
NBA All-Star Game Born in Wake of College Hoops Scandal
The NBA All-Star game was first played in 1951. At the time, professional basketball was seen as a quirky novelty, while college hoops gripped the attention of American sports fans. But a series of gambling-related scandals in the early 1950s were eating away at the popularity of the college game.
Haskell Cohen, who would go on to become a longtime fixture in the NBA publicity office, had just joined the organization at that time, and saw an opportunity. Cohen and then-Commissioner Maurice Podoloff met with Walter Brown, to pitch his idea for capitalizing on the crisis in college basketball and gaining attention for the NBA version — an annual All-Star game, as baseball had been staging since 1933.
Brown agreed to hold the inaugural NBA All-Star game at Boston Garden, and a tradition was born. But until 2025, the tradition consisted of a single game. This year, the 24 All-Star players are divided into three teams each named after, and “drafted” by a personality on the popular TNT Inside the NBA program: Team Chuck, Team Shaq, and Team Kenny.
The fourth team will be the winner of the Rising Stars tournament, a pre-All-Star event for rookie and second-year players, as well as G-League stars.
Mini-Tournament Starts Sunday at 8 pm
On Sunday, the four teams will play a mini-tournament — two semifinal games and a championship final — with each of the three games decided when one team reaches or breaks the 40-point mark. The players will compete for a $1.8 million prize pool with each player on the championship team receiving $125,000, with $50,000 each going to the players on the runner-up squad. The semifinal-losing players will receive $25,000 each.
Will that be enough for the NBA’s elite, multimillionaire athletes to step up their on-court intensity? As Brown remarked, “We’ll see.”
The All-Star mini-tournament gets underway Sunday at 8 pm ET, 5 pm PT, and will be televised by TNT and its affiliate, TruTV.
