NBA All-Star 2025: Winners and losers of the new format

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SAN FRANCISCO — Welcome to the Bay Area, where the NBA was the biggest loser of all.

On a mostly beautiful weekend in a mostly beautiful city, the league managed to turn its All-Star Game into anything but a showcase of the best basketball players in the world. Everyone from Golden State Warriors star Draymond Green to comedian Kevin Hart spent the weekend crapping on the product — even during the game itself — turning what was supposed to be a celebration of the sport into a joke.

LOSER: The NBA

We probably should have known it was headed that way when Anthony Edwards was asked about the exhibition’s new format and said, “I don’t really know too much about it.” He did not participate in the four-team tournament. Nor did LeBron James. Neither allowed the league time to field a replacement.

“It’s just who can run faster, who can hit more 3s; it’s no substance,” Green said on Saturday of the sport that has paid him in excess of a quarter of a billion dollars over the life of his career. “I think it’s very boring.”

On Sunday, Green doubled down, declaring the new format “ridiculous” and a “zero” that “sucks.”

It was not that the new format did not work. The basketball was more competitive than it has been in years, at least at the start. It is that the NBA made everything but the games a centerpiece of the night.

There is another way to interpret what Green said, but he will not want to hear it: The sport requires more athleticism and more skill than ever, and at 34 years old he can no longer make the same impact.

(Hassan Ahmad/Yahoo Sports Illustration)

The league could have celebrated that athleticism and skill, but instead it handed a microphone to Hart, who spent the first game of the tournament complaining to the crowd about “big men jacking 3s.” You could feel the energy being sucked from the arena with every criticism levied against the game.

It is the same critique Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal have levied against the league, creating an echo chamber that includes everyone who watches “Inside the NBA” on TNT. I have already written at length about this subject. This is nostalgia for a time that…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-all-star-2025-winners-and-losers-of-the-new-format-063643995.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2025-02-17 06:36:00

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