Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament was everything the NBA All-Star Game wants to be

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Napheesa Collier, right, drives past Aaliyah Edwards on her way to winning the Unrivaled 1-on-1 basketball final.Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP

To paraphrase a Nobel laureate on the perennial crises facing another form of live entertainment, the NBA All-Star Game is an institution that has been dying for 70 years but has yet to succumb. The complaints are persistent, well-documented, and mainly attributed to a single factor: players’ lack of effort. An absence of defensive activity, in particular, is said to make All-Star Games almost unwatchable.

For some players, the lack of effort is not an accident – the game falls in the middle of the NBA’s All-Star Break, a six-day pause in competitive play that serves as the only meaningful time off during the league’s 82-game regular season. Indeed, many of the players not named to All-Star teams use the break to go on holiday. Despite this tendency, however, the league’s leadership regularly alters its All-Star Weekend program in an (often ineffective) effort to encourage competitive play.

In the last decade alone, the NBA has introduced playground-style team selections (in lieu of players being assigned a team based on conference), clock-free Elam endings (too complicated to explain here), and even monetary bonuses, all in an effort to encourage players to take the All-Star Game more seriously. The results have been underwhelmin; even NBA commissioner Adam Silver seemed bored when presenting the winner’s trophy after last year’s game.

Related: Big money, star talent and glam rooms: will Unrivaled transform women’s basketball?

This year, the league is ditching its traditional two-team, single-game All-Star format in favor of a four-team, three-game mini-tournament. Whether this innovation will translate into quality basketball, however, remains to be seen. Given the All-Star Game’s recent history, it seems unlikely.

Further tinkering with the All-Star Game format continues to be limited by multiple factors, including the game’s relative rarity – as an annual event, fans and NBA executives alike must wait 12 months between each iteration, making…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/unrivaled-1-1-tournament-everything-090003438.html

Author : The Guardian

Publish date : 2025-02-16 09:00:00

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