NBA All-Star 2025: Will the new format work? Breaking down the weekend’s big questions

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With the frenzy of the 2025 NBA trade deadline now behind us, the attention of the NBA-watching world now shifts to the Bay Area for the high-octane basketball exhibition/convention/trade show that is 2025 All-Star Weekend. Here are a few things to keep an eye on as the league’s best and brightest strut their stuff across three days of basketball-adjacent endeavors, social media brand activation opportunities and fresh-coat-of-painted tournament-style play:

After the 2024 All-Star Game ended with the Eastern Conference scoring a record 211 points in a blowout victory that featured more from-the-logo launches than gestures in the direction of defense, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver sounded decidedly un-psyched about what he’d just witnessed:

Silver was far from the only observer who saw in last year’s spectacle a continuation of a bummerific recent trend: a Sunday showcase that’s supposed to represent the crown jewel of a wall-to-wall weekend celebrating the very best the NBA has to offer instead devolving into little more than a 3-point-line-to-3-point-line jog-through.

This led the commissioner — who’s never met a traditional conceit he couldn’t endeavor to disrupt! — to consider a shake-up to the established structure of the All-Star Game that went beyond a televised player draft or a “USA vs. the World”-style shift. Silver evidently found his sought-after shuffle when Stephen Curry, of all people, shuffled into his office.

“I wanted to take the opportunity of Steph stopping by to say, ‘What’s the format that you would like to see that you think other All-Star players would like to see to create more of an entertaining and competitive game for the fans?’” Silver recently told Tim Kawakami of the San Francisco Standard. “And he said from his standpoint that maybe breaking up the game a bit, shorter games, multiple games, he thought was certainly of interest to him and he thought would be of interest to other players as well.”

From that conversation spawned the tournament-style structure we’ll see…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-all-star-2025-will-the-new-format-work-breaking-down-the-weekends-big-questions-153616021.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2025-02-14 15:36:00

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