With the NBA All-Star game around the corner, there is a lot of buzz around the league about the new format of playing the main event. Team World faces two subdivisions of the Team USA roster in an attempt to make the game more competitive.
But the NBA can further add another twist to the format next season in order to make it more competitive, suggests NBA analyst Nick Wright. During his recent appearance on Bill Simmons’ podcast with the Ringer, Wright dove into a creative but complicated solution to making the All-Star game even more competitive.
“It is fixable in four years if your guy Kon Knueppel continues on this trajectory. And we just have to say, you know what? ‘PC headlines be damned… White guys versus black guys: Luka, Joker, Flagg, Reaves, Knueppel against Wemby or whoever. I’m telling you right now, guys will play f**king hard,” said Wright.
Wright strongly believes that such a format would add an edge to the game, while Simmons agreed that this format would get a lot of eyes on the game, but did not comment on how effective such a format could be, while appearing to be in agreement with Wright.
Victor Wembanyama and other players have recently addressed the competition factor of the All-Star game and already seem adamant on changing that this season. In my opinion, such a format would complicate the selection process even further, let alone the issue of the moral side of dividing teams based on race.
Furthermore, on the same episode of the podcast, Simmons went on to criticize the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, for not addressing ground-level issues of the game.
“To me, there are huge fundamental issues with the league that they’re just ‘yada-ing’ and pointing to all the media money they’ve made and the fact that their players are famous and that everybody loves the playoffs.”
“It’s like the regular season has real issues. It’s too long. Guys are getting hurt too much. Everybody is making so much money. The only reason to have 82 games is that you make money from it. You go down to 70. You make less money.”
“Guess what? Devin Booker, instead of making $75 million in 2028, will make $73 million. He’ll be fine. All this sh**, everything they’re doing, they’re not serving the larger picture of what fans want.”
“How do we keep our players healthy? How do we have a competitive season from start to finish? How do we avoid over 1/4 of our league not giving a sh** for the last two months? How do we fix this?”
“And it’s the first time I’ve really wondered, like, do we have the right guy running the league? Because he doesn’t seem interested in actually fixing real problems that everybody can see.”
“And it’s not about like ‘look at the NBA cup. Oh, we created this thing.’ It’s like your schedule’s too long. You have to fix this. It’s too long. It should be 70 games.”
As much as the change in the All-Star game format was to facilitate better competition between players, Simmons believes Adam Silver and the league’s upper management are mainly concerning themselves with increasing the league’s revenue instead of addressing grassroots-level issues with the game.
Do you think fixing the competitive element is among the top problems of the league right now? Or should they focus on other problems around the regular season? Let us know what you think in the comments section.
