- As most of you will read this Monday morning, it should be pointed out that it was written Sunday afternoon, prior to the main event.
- J. Cole has handles.
- For those too young to have seen or remember, Mitch Richmond was the league’s best, most complete shooting guard during those years of Jordan’s retirement. Watching the former legend waddle around the court at well over 300 lbs. was just too painful, shattering all the pleasant memories I once had.
- The NBA needs to just get rid of some of these filler events altogether, because it’s becoming a complete embarrassment. Hey, we have, out of a trade union of the 300 best basketball players in the world, the single best point guards/ball handlers at our disposal. Let’s have them dribble around cones at half speed and take layups and time it! I wish I was making this up. You can’t conjure up a greater waste of talent. The Skills Challenge is akin to rounding up world famous economists and having them go head to head over addition/subtraction flash cards.
- I think the Skills Challenge is emblematic of the greater generational divide. Today’s generation of fans doesn’t consider dribbling around cones at half-speed as some entertaining feat. And the athletes have far more skill to offer. Maybe it’s the NBA’s stubborn way of imposing its anti-And-1 agenda? ”These are the only things you can do with a basketball!” There are so many more tricks these guys have in their bags that it’s curious they aren’t showcased in some form of competition. Who has the best crossover? Stop defining the bounds of ‘skill’ to constrain within some notion of ‘fundamentals.’ This isn’t the 70′s. Accept what these men can now do and embrace it.
- I have nothing against the WNBA. I think it’s fantastic that the women have a professional league. But please stop shoving it and its players in my face when I’m trying to enjoy men’s basketball. At least the league wisened up and stopped airing WNBA commercials at every turn. But still, few things are more irritating than having a WNBA player included in basically every event. Just leave it alone. Advertise in other markets. Stop tarnishing the NBA brand by pushing in other products your target audience doesn’t want.
- The 3 point contest is great and shouldn’t be touched.
- It’s not sound strategy to stubbornly stick with what’s clearly not working. The league needs to get rid of all of these gimmick events. Scrap the dunk contest too. It’s become an embarrassment for the league. The only competitions still worth watching are the 3 point shootout and Rising Stars.. Get rid of the skills challenge. Get rid of all of the silly events from over the years featuring WNBA players (changing the name of 2-ball to Haier Shooting Stars is not a fix.) Go to the drawing board with your multitude of Harvard MBA’s and figure out how to recoup your millions. There are ways to make this better.
- The ultimate events would be 1-on-1 or, 3-on-3, the latter giving new meaning to ‘SuperFriends’. No one of any repute would ever do the former – too much risk of getting embarrassed. But I do think you might have some luck with 3-on-3. NBA Jam would finally come to fruition for a host of 20-somethings.
- At the least, watching scrubs like Jeremy Evans go at it in 1-on-1 would be more entertaining than watching them in the Dunk Contest. I’ll give the kid major props for dunking two balls. But no one who did what he did for that first dunk–where he sort of went up, dunked it, and twisted around while hanging on the rim as if to compensate for the dunk itself–should have a shot at winning the thing.
- Chase was robbed. His were the most creative. Though one wonders why he went straight up and did the same dunk as Williams, minutes after, without the motorcycle. Not smart and that’s probably what cost him. Still, I was proud of Chase and thought he did a great job representing the team.
UPDATE at 10:40AM, Monday morning:
A reader, Jeby, writes:
I don’t think the league needs to scrap the dunk contest, they just need to put more pressure on superstars to participate. If we saw Lebron vs. Griffin vs. Wall vs. Westbrook going at each other with the exact same dunks as Jeremy Evans and Paul George pulled off last night, fans would go nuts. Why those guys refuse to get involved, I have no idea. Seeing as Jordan and Kobe are both dunk champions, I don’t think any player can make the excuse that the contest is somehow beneath them.
The reader hit the nail right on the head. I’ve been listening to the radio all weekend and browsing various online resources, and I think a lot of people are experiencing a sort of sensory dissonance, attributing the wrong causes to their conclusions. Everyone agrees the dunk contest sucks. But they’re all saying it’s because the dunkers suck, that they need the superstars to have good dunks, that Jordan/Nique were such better dunkers. That’s all complete hogwash.
The reason the dunk contest sucks is that a) everything has been done before, so none of these visuals stimulate our senses and excite us and b) no one cares about scrubs dunking.
It has nothing to do with superstars being better dunkers. No one in the NBA could pull off a better dunk than that “dunk two balls at the same time” gimmick the Utah 15th man nailed down. It’s just that he’s a nobody, so we don’t care. If that had been Lebron, we’d still be talking about it.
The second point is that dunks inherently just look better in-game…thus, everyone was falling over themselves during the ASG last night in the 1st quarter about that in-game dunk fest somehow being proof that the superstars are needed for the real thing. In actuality, its visually much more stimulating seeing a guy come through traffic and destroy the rim. It takes us by surprise. There are multiple obstacles (ie: defenders.) But the superstars are the only ones good enough to do that in-game because they’re the only ones good enough to be in those situations. It’s not the dunks themselves; it’s the totality of the circumstances and environment. When Lebron and Wade take off on a fast-break and Wade tosses it up and Lebron grabs it in mid-flight and flushes it, our jaws drop. But the dunk itself isn’t, by itself, isn’t what evokes the emotions. Jeremy Evans could do the exact same dunk, without defenders. What Jeremy Evans could never hope to do is have the body control to contort himself through traffic and time his jump perfectly on a fastbreak etc. etc.
Moving on, re: the All-Star game last night. All you can really hope for in any All-Star game is for it to get close at the end so you can watch some real ball. And I’ll tell ya, there’s really nothing better than those few minutes you get every few years of the game’s very best going at it. It’s fascinating seeing, amongst the combinations, who emerges as the dominant personality, taking control of the offense. It’s also great seeing the designated shotblocker, whether it be Dwight or Mutombo in years past, scramble to protect the rim against onslaughts of future Hall of Famers.
I wish there was a way to cut out all the meaningless time ahead and force competition. If we know that they will play hard if the game is close and late, then this must be an objective. I tossed around the idea of a 3 on 3 tournament as one of the earlier events – what about 3 on 3 in lieu of the actual All-Star game? You have the same voting setup. But instead of one game, you make the entire weekend into a 3 on 3 tournament, with each game lasting ten minutes. Or maybe twenty minutes, I don’t know. The league would randomly assign the teams. But the point is that the short format would force the guys to go at it.
