Looks like Adam Silver is out there again, tinkering away and trying to fix that rusted out old heap in the driveway that hasn't run right in years and has a wasp hive nestled against the drivetrain after years of inactivity. In other words, he's messing around with the All-Star Game.
Credit to him for trying, anyway. Silver is nothing if not persistent, and at his pay grade as commissioner of your National Basketball Association, he'd damned well better be. He is already being given credit for the largely illusory benefits of the in-season tournament, which is mostly just a tribute to schedule manipulation (good games between good teams are always that, Emirates branding be damned), some gym floor murals by 12-year-olds with an unlimited supply of spray paint, and a trophy nobody has any particular attachment to. But Silver does understand that customers will buy anything they can be fooled into thinking is worth the attention span. The challenge, where the All-Star Game is concerned, is that no one is fooled.
The All-Star Game has been a particularly thorny thought exercise because it is built on a 70-year-old template and 60-year-old assumptions, starting with the fact that while it has all (or many) of the stars, it hasn't really been a game in forever. Players want to be named to the team for financial and ego-based reasons, but have no compelling reason to care about the outcome, or even provide the appearance of interest. The average score of 175-164 over the past 11 years speaks to the level of defensive avoidance at work in the game, and last year's 211-186 cliffhanger enraged everyone but Anthony Edwards.
So Silver, probably out of exasperation as much as anything else, has urged a new format to replace all the other new formats, and this one is no less silly than any of the others. It is bringing back the notion of pickup basketball, like on the schoolyard when you were a kid—a four-team tournament with two semifinal games played up to 40 points, with the winners advancing to a first-to-25 final.
It's the latest attempt to arrest the artistic rot that has turned the All-Star Game into must-see-anything-else television. And unless fans have fully completed the turn toward bovine consumerism and are now willing to eat anything just to dull the pain of everyday living, this should wear off just as quickly as all the other tweaks. The real issue is that the game, in whatever form, cannot provide sufficient incentives to make the players adhere to any kind of competitive structure, and they all know that sustaining an injury in an All-Star Game is the worst way to spend their time off from real work. The value of the All-Star Game to players is in being named to the team, not in playing the damned thing; the value of the All-Star Game to owners and network executives amounts to filling a programming window. The game sucks now because nobody is especially incentivized to make it not suck. It's commerce rather than art, and commerce is by its very nature dull and soulless.
But you know all these things. Adam Silver also knows all these things. What he is trying to do is find an incentive to keep the bank window open in the middle of February, and hope that since players compete every day, one more day of competition in and of itself isn't going to trigger their adrenals.
So why not this for an idea, tiered for your pleasure?
- No more bonuses for being named to an All-Star team. You get paid only if you play, or if you have a note from an orthopedist who doesn't like basketball excusing you.
- You get paid more the better you play, as judged not by a box score (name last year's leading scorer without looking, we dare you) but by a panel of the 28 current head coaches not coaching in the game, with judgments like work rate, defensive commitment, and ball distribution. You know, the stuff they all harp on during timeouts when the players are ignoring them. It's not like those coaches are taking the weekend off anyway. They're salaried employees and should be working for the firm, plus they're all psychotics breaking down video in the middle of the night when they should be sipping femur-length pina coladas in Martinique with their families.
- The game is played with an exploding ball that can go off at any time. That's just for our amusement, not for the betterment of the game.
- The most valuable player does not have to pose with Silver and the trophy. Silver's a decent enough fellow, we suppose, but he always looks like he's watching his general store burn to the ground in 1897.
But maybe this is just a problem to too few people in a world with plenty of problems for everyone. Maybe the All-Star Game only exists now as a craft fair, and Silver has to figure out how to keep up basketball appearances among disparate stakeholders who are only in it for the bric-a-brac sales and parties. Maybe Anthony Edwards is right after all.
And maybe 211-186 is what the players want, because it's less emotionally and physically taxing than actual basketball. Sure the ratings are down and the audience is vaguely dissatisfied, but the number of bidders for streaming rights remains high. Maybe it’s out of professional pride or maybe it’s just boredom, but Adam Silver is messing around under the hood regardless, even though he knows there’s nowhere to drive this smoke-belching relic even if he somehow cleared the wasps and got the engine to turn over.
