After another poorly received NBA All-Star Weekend, fans and experts have continued discussing what the league can do to make the contest more compelling. One of the very commonly-suggested fixes is introducing a Team USA vs. Team World contest which pits the NBA’s best American stars against a unified team of the world’s best.
This would be compelling and provide an answer to the age-old question of whether the USA is still the supreme nation in basketball. That honor will make the players inherently play hard, but Rachel Nichols doesn’t believe it could ever be implemented for two key reasons that she revealed on the ‘All The Smoke’ podcast.
“It’s two reasons why I can sit here and tell you, just knowing the business of the NBA, why I don’t think we will ever see USA versus the world.”
“First, I think the Eastern Conference team owners and the Western Conference team owners still want their equal number of spots. Having an All-Star for you is good for you and good for marketing. They’re not going to give that up.”
“Second, at least right now, even though you would have a really good world team, the end of the roster would be softer. Then, you’d have a bunch of American guys who should be All-Stars—like, legit All-Stars—who wouldn’t make it if the roster was only 10 to 12 spots.”
Nichols makes excellent points, as these are very clearly two fatal flaws in this idea.
The 24 All-Star spots have never seen 12 international stars earn nods, even though the All-NBA teams have started to lean more international across their 15 spots. Now that you can’t really include Joel Embiid as an international player, there isn’t really a lot of depth to credibly say there will be 12 All-Stars.
The NBA can’t use the All-Star game as a tool for this matchup. Unless 12 international players naturally earn their spots while maintaining Conference integrity, this will be an impossible idea to implement.
This is being discussed after the success the NHL had in making their All-Star Game a tournament of national pride by inter-country matchups. The Finals between the USA and Canada were a massive success, prompting many to encourage the NBA to explore the idea themselves.
Given how much an All-Star selection still means to players, they wouldn’t be on board with scrapping the traditional All-Star system to make way for this, especially because American players are at a major disadvantage here.
There are plenty of other ways to spice up the All-Star game than forced international rivalries. They tried innovating with this season’s format and the mini-tournament, but just adding national identities to a similar format wouldn’t work.
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