What Is the NBA Doing for All-Star Weekend? Just Another Adam Silver Failure

NBA All-Star Weekend is now upon us, and once again, the NBA is rolling out a new format because they’ve realized their All-Star Game is one of the worst (if not the worst) in all of sports.

This year, they’re going with the format fans have been suggesting for a long time: USA vs. the World. However, they’ve done a weird thing with it and turned it into a format that nobody understands.

I haven’t even fully read up on it, but based on what I’ve seen, there are three teams of eight players. Two of them are United States teams made up of all-American players, and then there’s one Team World featuring the international stars. Apparently, it’s a round-robin, and the two best teams at the end face off.

At the end of the day, I’ve already gone on way too long just explaining how this All-Star Game works. And that’s the problem.

If it takes more than one sentence to explain your All-Star Game format, it’s too complicated.

So going into this weekend, I am once again not excited to watch the NBA’s All-Star Game. And that’s a travesty. The NBA’s All-Stars should be some of the best athletes in the world to watch in that setting. They have elite athletic ability. The things they can do with a basketball are sometimes like a work of art.

And yet, there’s no hype around this.

Because the NBA has once again made its All-Star Game into a joke.

I’m somewhat glad that more of the public is catching on to what I’ve been saying about Commissioner Adam Silver for years.

He needs to go.

Under Silver, in my opinion, the NBA has declined in multiple ways.

We’re seeing more and more superstars go down with injuries. Stars sit out games, which is supposedly to help them in the long term, but they’re still getting hurt, so it completely counteracts the purpose.

I truly believe the stars don’t respect him. They don’t fear him.

He’s made trading in the NBA more complicated than it needs to be. Teams that want to get rid of bad contracts, or superstars who want to position themselves on contending teams, can’t do that as easily anymore. While that may have been a problem in the past, look at someone like Giannis Antetokounmpo. He’s essentially stuck in Milwaukee because it’s so hard to move a player of that magnitude under today’s structure.

He’s also turned parts of the regular season into a gimmick with the NBA Cup, a tournament nobody, and I mean nobody, truly cares about.

Did you invite your friends over to watch an NBA Cup game like you would invite them over to watch a playoff game?

No.

Because it’s a gimmick.

Another thing is the Play-In tournament.

Some people liked it at the time, but I’ve always thought the play-in tournament was questionable.

I understood it during the COVID bubble, it was a weird circumstance and probably the fairest solution at the time as team's did not play a full 82-game schedule that year.

But now?

In the Eastern Conference, we see the same teams in it every year. In the Western Conference, it’s a dogfight all season long, and 82 games of hard work can be undone by two bad games. Games that don’t even count on your career stat sheet.

In my opinion, 82 games is enough to determine who deserves to make the playoffs. We don’t need a play-in tournament deciding postseason spots.

Now, back to the All-Star game.

This game, and the complete lack of hype around it, is just another example of why Adam Silver needs to go.

We need a commissioner players fear.

David Stern was that guy. Players feared him. Owners feared him. There was authority there.

With Adam Silver, players walk all over him.

So when I log onto Twitter on Sunday night and see everyone talking about how the NBA All-Star Game is once again a joke, and how Adam Silver needs to do something about it, my opinion is simple: The first thing the NBA should do is get rid of him.