Because everyone else at Industrial Foundry No. 682 is basking in the joys of publicly libidinous biathletes and their subtly vengeful exes, snow-runners with nuclear quad muscles, credit card-kiting biathletes, deeply sinister ice dancers, free-range groin photographers, and cartoon murder-stoats, some poor mope has to tackle the backed-up septic tank that is the NBA All-Star Game. Not the thing itself, blessedly, it's not quite that dark yet, but the break is looming just over the horizon of the weekend. You can already feel the symptoms emerging, and see them on the Peacock channel guide.
There are still three regular-season games Thursday night—well, timed basketball events of minimal consequence, if we're honest about it—before the league's weeklong break begins, but to listen to the people who purport to care most about the game, the league is up to its eyelids in scorpion venom sunscreen. The All-Star Game itself has been a hot mess for years, and now seems to be in full Pro Bowl territory, but that's the least of Adam Silver's migraines. The NBA, as a whole, is only barely keeping it together, at least beyond those ever-rising franchise values.
Tanking is so rampant that teams that win are accused of undermining the product; this is not new in itself, but the grousing about it is in full flower a month earlier than usual, and being done twice as vehemently by twice as many teams. Utah alone has gamed the system so well that even people who hate tanking admire how they've done it. Load management is now the default for grumps who want to player-hate, even though the players aren't the ones doing the managing. The bench-emptying brawl returned with a vengeance, or anyway with a lot of shouting and a few empty swings, as an expression of competitiveness; Pistons big man Isaiah Stewart is one of the next generation of statement players just because his rep is that of a guy who would rather punch your face into the face of the person behind you than get a rebound in a one-point game. Your mileage for that sort of thing will vary, but it's not a thing of beauty.
The All-Star format is, as always, a mishmash of bad ideas slammed together in a cyclotron; the weekend is now stacked with influencers, and the celebrity game is in and of itself a bilefest of uselessness, while the game itself may have fewer bankable stars in it since Syracuse beat Fort Wayne for the championship 70-some-odd years ago. Everyone wants the schedule shortened by about 20 percent, except for the 30 people who run the sport, which means the schedule will somehow probably lengthened by 10 in the next CBA negotiation. LeBron James has arthritis, Stephen Curry has runner's knee, Luka Doncic lost his hamstring halfway up his glute, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has a touchy abdomen, Giannis Antetokounmpo's calf is still upset that the rest of him wasn't traded, and even Cooper Flagg, who is 13 years old, has been scratched from the game due to injury. The old stars are aging out of their primes and the young ones haven't fully flowered yet. The one young star who mostly has, Victor Wembanyama, scares some people into thinking he will ruin the game by being fundamentally unguardable. Mark Cuban wants to buy back his team from the people he sold it to two years ago, the ones who traded Doncic for insufficiently defined abs and received 29 games of Anthony Davis in return. Oh, and the Clippers scam-o-rama is continuing to develop.
All of which makes this weekend a great time to take a break, but also makes the All-Star Weekend feel like a trade show where everyone is miserable or about to be. It is a tribute to the power of pervasive bitterness, and a story which will be dominated not by the skills competition or however many actual all-star games there really are this year, but by commissioner Silver's State Of What You All Hate address Saturday afternoon.
Los Angeles, the site of Hell's All-Star Weekend, is where Silver made his bones 12 years ago. That was when he took the public lead after the final Donald Sterling scandal and was credited with the owners' decision to give the then-Clippers owner $2 billion to leave the team and piss off for good; it still feels like the highlight of his tenure atop the league. The billionaire the owners begged to replace Sterling, mega-wealthy Microsoft planet-eater Steve Ballmer, is still embroiled in an ongoing salary-cap contravention scandal surrounding Kawhi Leonard, but at least his team isn't actively trying to lose the way Sterling's could with such perpetual ease. They're mostly confounding, in the way that post-Sterling Clippers teams have tended to be.
The bigger issue, it increasingly seems, is Silver's explanations for all these PR mudslides. Of course he cannot fix any of them, but his main job is to pretend like he has something to say about them, and so he has to give the performance of his life on Saturday afternoon when he aims to "address" all the things that presently ail a multi-billion dollar industry. And when we say "address," we of course mean "offer no ideas toward a viable solution to any of them." As a spokesman for a bunch of billionaires, Silver is finally a waiter at a fast food restaurant that specializes in anthrax sandwiches; this week's toy with your unhappy meal is Davis looking sad in a Washington Wizards jersey, and it is very definitely a choking hazard.
When your commissioner is the biggest star of your league's big weekend, you see, you're in trouble. When things are swell, that commissioner doesn't need to be heard or seen; when things stink, as is the popular perception among people not totally smitten with the product (like NBC), that commissioner will have to do the song and dance that is supposed to make everyone feel better. Another big challenge, there, is that Silver's gifts as an entertainer can be matched by a coat rack.
These moods pass, of course; the season really is too long, and this is when that fact is most fully felt. James cannot be given one last All-NBA award for career achievement, which is cause for olde-timey fans who just got over Larry Bird retiring six weeks ago. When the battles for the final play-in spots divert our attentions, it will feel better, and when the playoffs finally start it will feel like the playoffs—delusional mania times 14. But there are seven weeks between now and then, and even if you allow for the mood of the business reflecting the mood of the nation at large, this feels like a sour moment for a sport predicated upon joy, or at least upon trying hard to look joyful. Given all that, the prospect of Silver's address is compelling in the way that a car crash can be. These are difficult times for men in suits, but not entirely hopeless ones. They just call for creativity, and Silver's droning platitudinous blatherings won't do it. He needs to dress it up, in his case by a lot.
Thus, we suggest that he get one of the murder stoat costumes flown out from Milan and bite the head off Dillon Brooks, just as an example to all the others? Hey, the man is fighting for the entertainment dollar, just like everyone else. A little plush ultraviolence won't answer any of the questions people have about the sport and its business practices, but it will let everyone stop thinking about the Memphis Grizzlies for a while.
