Culture
The NBA can tinker with the All-Star Game all it wants, but there’s only one fix
Since the NBA is considering altering the format of the All-Star Game, I have some ideas.
USA vs. The World has more juice than ever, from an NBA perspective. Think about the starting lineup the Americans would have to face: Nikola Jokić at center, Luka Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in the backcourt, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama as the forwards. USA’s starting five ain’t a joke: Anthony Davis at center, LeBron James and Kevin Durant at forward, Stephen Curry and Anthony Edwards in the backcourt.
Or how about the old heads vs. the next generation? The under-30s against the gray beards. Or, make the dividing line the 2014 draft — halfway between LeBron’s draft and the last one. Turn it into a full-on NBA culture war. Gen Z vs. the Millennials. Make fans pick a side and divide San Francisco’s Chase Center, this season’s host arena, in half.
Oh, wait. Just thought of an even better alteration. The idea to end all ideas, sure to make the All-Star Game spectacular. It’s so clear a solution, it’s hard to believe no one in the NBA hasn’t already thought of it. So sure a fix is this, it might actually sound like a crazy idea.
PLAY HARD.
If not 100 percent, then 75. If not for the whole game, for a half. Even for just the final quarter.
Boom. Problem solved.
Any format changes are but Scotch Tape. Any concocted gimmicks are covering up the real issue like lacquering barbecue sauce on dry beef. The one thing everyone wants is to see the best players earnestly compete against each other.
Figure out what it takes to make that happen and do that. Because no one really wants to see defense powered by apathy and deep 3-pointers hoisted without regard. Otherwise, Washington Wizards games on League Pass would be a party.
The lure of the All-Star Game isn’t simply to see the best players. It’s to witness them face each other. There aren’t any real stakes. So the lone draw is the rare occasion to see opposing teams loaded with superstars go at each other.
The All-Star Game once was the only place to see this collection of stars together. To see what type of personality they had and how they interacted with each other. It was the chance to see some of the new stars you heard about but didn’t get to watch usually.
Just seeing the stars on the court together isn’t enough in the modern era to make the NBA All-Star Game compelling. (Kevin Mazur / Getty Images)
But in the modern era, we see all of them all of the time. The way social media has reconfigured the landscape and the access to games through cable and streaming already gave them high visibility. And now they’re all pushing podcasts like aunties peddling Mary Kay in the ’90s. The sheer novelty of their presence has been diminished, the pageantry of the annual showcase undermined.
Undoubtedly, the mere gathering of such stars will always be a spectacle. You just don’t get the 10 best players of any era together outside of the All-Star Game, at least not in their prime. But such only increased the demand for a dramatic end to the weekend. The one way to secure it is to find a solution that prompts true competition.
We know they get after it. We know they’ll go hard. All it took was a trip to Las Vegas, some nail polish on the court and a $500,000 purse to make the NBA Cup real.
It’s a little more complicated than players ratcheting up their intensity. It’s not just on the players.
The league would have to make some sacrifices. Part of the issue the players face is the demand for their time during the weekend. The obligations seem to grow and will continue to do so as the league’s partners grow.
That’s the league’s money, so it must be done. But if it damages the product by limiting the potential of the All-Star Game, it’s worth reining in some of the demands.
GO DEEPER
How can the NBA fix the All-Star Game? Our writers share their ideas
As I’ve been told, the players’ preparation is so dramatically different at All-Star. The practices aren’t real, much more like the open-to-the-public practices teams do for their fans. The intrusiveness of the spectacle compromises pregame regimens.
If taking on the Utah Jazz requires full preparation, taking on the best in the league is worthy of it too. If the potential for injury in an exhibition game is a concern, it’s for sure heightened by inadequate prep time. Especially for an All-Star roster replete with players over a decade in.
The NBA can do things to free them up. Give them space for a real practice, one without TV cameras and fans interrupting with cheers.
Clear their schedules for Sunday. Make it all about the game. Even do the eight-hour introductions on Saturday or make the videos on Sunday. An AI-generated hologram of Donovan Mitchell standing on the stage not only works but also fits the Silicon Valley vibes of an All-Star Game in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the players can warm up in the practice facility.
Prioritize the game by making sure they have no excuses not to go hard.
Everything else concocted in the name of entertainment value is rooted in this same principle. From the Elam Ending to the players’ draft themselves to money for chosen charities. It is all designed with the same aim — to manufacture a competitive spirit. To incentivize intensity. To put some juice into the showcase.
Allen Iverson led a 21-point comeback in the 2001 NBA All-Star Game, leading the East to an improbable win over Kobe Bryant and the West. (Andy Hayt / NBAE via Getty Images)
Who could ever forget the 2001 All-Star Game? The Eastern Conference squad, led by Allen Iverson, rallied from a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit to stun the West. It was the most riveting display for a generation. Maybe ever. A comeback for the ages.
It didn’t require some contrived format. They weren’t worried about getting embarrassed or being criticized. They weren’t deterred by the possibility of injury and the jeopardy it could bring. They weren’t obsessed with numbers and recognition.
Yet, they provided an All-Star Game moment for the ages. In the final eight minutes, they lived up to the moment, honored their grand reputations and treated the NBA audience in such a way we still remember. And they did it by doing the one magic solution.
They played hard.
(Top photo: Brian Sevald / NBAE via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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