NBA All-Star Game – East vs. West – 8:00pm ET – TNT
All-Star Saturday night was not a rousing success. The Skills Challenge kept going and going and going. Tyrese Maxey felt there was a malfunction with the arrows on the LED court that led to him going the wrong direction in the dribbling portion of the event. With his team going first, it did seem to me in real time like the arrows didn’t show up until after he was beyond the spot.
A VERY SERIOUS Tyrese Maxey about his skills competition performance: “Well, honestly, I think that the home team rigged us. I think we won the passing. They told me that the lines were going to be on the court when we when we did the little course, and that didn’t happen.”
— Gina Mizell (@ginamizell) February 18, 2024
I had two other gripes. Why is the shooting section the same amount of points as the other two sections combined? It’s not a pure shooting competition. We also don’t need a half court shot tiebreaker again.
The three-point shootout was solid as always. That’s a bread-and-butter event. The Steph vs. Sabrina heads-up competition was also fun. Sabrina tied the score of all the finalists in the three-point shootout and then Steph topped it for the best score of the night. Shooters gonna shoot.
The dunk contest was a mess. It felt like the judges handled Jaylen Brown with kid gloves because the league wanted stars to continue participating. They were giving him better scores than the other contestants for extremely tame dunks. Jacob Toppin deserved a trip to the final. Mac McClung defended his title so we avoided the riot that would have resulted from a Brown title, but it was an underwhelming contest on the whole. Only McClung’s self toss in mid-air and one of Toppin’s dunks were really anything special, in my opinion.
Anyway, we’re on to tonight’s All-Star Game. The West is slight favorites, but we’ll be pulling for Tyrese Maxey and the East in Maxey’s All-Star Game debut. Bam Adebayo replaced Joel Embiid in the starting lineup with Embiid sidelined post-surgery, excuse me, procedure. There was a lot of talk this weekend about the desire for this game to be more competitive. We’ll see if any of that comes to fruition.
Larry Bird on the All-Star Game, which the NBA wants to be more competitive: “I think it’s very important when you have the best players in the world together, you’ve got to compete and you’ve got to play hard and you’ve got to show the fans how good they really are.”
— Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) February 18, 2024
We have no NBA basketball for a few days after tonight. Follow along in the comments and enjoy the game, even if it isn’t a perfect product.