For a league taking L’s left and right this past week, at least the NBA can say they saved the All-Star Game.
A contest that had been mostly a disaster for roughly two decades received a much-needed facelift when it split USA players from the rest of the world into teams, who then played a round-robin of one-quarter games to determine the winner.
Veteran basketball pundits Zach Lowe and Bill Simmons explained on “The Bill Simmons Podcast” that while the NBA has failed to fix tanking, playing-time manipulation and game flow, at least the All-Star Game is watchable again.
“It was a great bit of redemption for the NBA,” Lowe said on the podcast. “It was definitely the world’s better than two years ago when it was 211-180-something, and the five All-Star games before it were dunk, dunk, laziness. This was a fun game. There were fouls, blocked shots, buzzer beaters, and drama.”
“Team Stars” was a group of younger players that wound up winning after they defeated “Team Stripes,” which consisted of LeBron James and a group of veteran faces of the league.
“A huge win for a league that needed a win,” Simmons said while adding that he gave the new All-Star Game “two thumbs up” as the game at one point appeared to be heading toward NFL Pro Bowl status.
Where things get really dicey is tanking, injuries, schedule length and much more, as the league deals with questions about the relevance of the regular season.
Simmons admits he has been hard on commissioner Adam Silver, as the league has clear issues with tanking that he has often left unpunished, as teams like the Utah Jazz and Brooklyn Nets find creative ways to lose games on purpose for a better draft pick.
“If you’re judging [the job that Adam Silver has done as commissioner] by what the league is like competitively, this is about as bad we’ve been in since the early 80s,” Simmons said.
Simmons then goes on to list the problems with the league, adding that the season is too long and the second half of the regular season is mostly meaningless, with the only reason to maintain 82 games being money.
“This is why I was so hard on Silver,” Simmons said. “This is the most important decision of his entire career. If he can’t do this. If he can’t convince two separate groups of people that are tough to convince anything that the season has to be shorter and here’s all the reasons why… This is a crisis now.”
What hasn’t been fixed about All-Star Weekend is the Slam Dunk Contest, as several star young players have refused to participate in recent years, while the league taps G-League-level players to compete, despite them hardly being NBA-level talent.
Mac McClung, who has played in 10 career NBA games, won three consecutive seasons from 2023 to 2025, while Keshad Johnson won this year despite playing in 21 games as a rookie.