Adam Silver is one of the most forward thinking commissioner’s in the history of sports. Since taking over the reins of the National Basketball Association in 2014 from the legendary pioneering late commissioner David Stern, Westchester native Silver has cemented the league as the vanguard of North American professional sports.
Partnerships between sports leagues and sportsbooks were still considered a third rail and potentially deleterious to the integrity of professional sports, but Silver’s prescient lobbying efforts changed widespread perceptions. Now one of his next transformative challenges in conjunction with the NBA players should be to address the declining credibility of the All-Star Game.
Alas, for this basketball junkie, the All-Star Game has devolved into an insufferable farce. Watching from the comfort of my home this past Sunday, I turned it off early in the first quarter and never switched back until the final minutes simply to learn what ridiculously elevated score the exhibition would reach.
211-186!
What!
Nah man, enough is enough!
Growing up as a young boy, I can still vividly recall the palpable anticipation and elation the annual NBA All-Star Game elicited in me. It had an enchanted aura, seeing the players—Walt Frazier, Jerry West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—representing their respective teams. Decades later as a journalist, in 1998, those emotions barely waned as I sat only several rows up from the Madison Square Garden court, behind one of the baskets and adjacent to the players’ bench, to witness live the great Kobe Bryant’s All-Star debut.
While the game held an inherent element of entertainment, the natural and impregnable competitive spirit of the performers, some of the best to ever lace up kicks, Bryant, Shaquille O’ Neal, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and the greatest of all-time, Michael Jordan, was irrepressible. Jordan would ultimately win the game’s MVP as his Eastern Conference squad prevailed over the Western Conference 135-114.
In 2001, it was Allen Iverson who garnered the MVP playing at the MCI Center in Washington D.C., as he and the then New Jersey Nets’ Stephon Marbury willed the East to a dramatic and memorable 111-110 comeback win over the West after trailing 95-74 with nine minutes remaining. One year later, Kobe earned his first All-Star Game MVP in Philadelphia at the First Union Center, carrying the West to a 135-120 victory.
The irony was inescapable as Philly is the city where he honed his massive skills and his unsurpassed resolve to attain excellence.
The meaningful character and vigor of the All-Star game must be revived or like the NFL’s Pro Bowl game, which ended in 2022 and became a flag football affair in 2023, the NBA should just scrap it.
