NBA All-Star Weekend is not meant to be taken super seriously, but The Ringer’s NBA All-Star Weekend Winners and Losers column absolutely is. From Friday night’s Rising Stars Challenge to Sunday night’s ever-controversial All-Star Game, here are the winners and losers from a modestly eventful weekend.
Losers: LeBron James and Anthony Edwards
Loser is obviously too strong of a word here, but the format of this column allows zero flexibility. Please bear with us. On Sunday afternoon, a few hours before the All-Star Game was set to tip off, LeBron revealed that some ankle and foot discomfort would prevent him from playing. The news was a bummer on several levels, including and especially its timing, which was late enough to prevent some All-Star snubs—Domantas Sabonis, Norm Powell, etc.—from filling in as a potential replacement. Same deal for Edwards, who didn’t play due to groin soreness. When did the groin soreness occur? It’s all just a bit disappointing.
Winner: Stephon Castle
On his way to being named the MVP of the Rising Stars Challenge, Castle hit the clinching pull-up jumper in Team C’s first game and then refused to lose against the scrappy Team G League, scoring 12 of the necessary 25 points and chipping in two of his team’s four assists.
The fireworks continued on Saturday night. In the dunk contest, Castle reached the finals, clocked a perfect score on his final dunk, and barely lost to one of the event’s all-time most accomplished and creative participants. His penultimate attempt—a between-the-legs reverse jam on which he caught the ball after it fell through the net—was not given a 50, which felt like a violation of international law. Castle then held his own throughout a mostly uninspiring exhibition on Sunday night.
Castle taking home the Rookie of the Year is not a foregone conclusion, but if the San Antonio Spurs don’t completely fade out of the play-in race and remain competitive over the next six weeks, it would be a bit of a surprise to see anyone else win that award.
I also wondered—watching Castle embody the confidence of a 28-year-old, bullying defenders and showing off unearthly athleticism—how many real All-Star Games he’ll make throughout his career. Two? Three? More? This is Jrue Holiday with bounce. He has footwork, vision, and, sooner rather than later, he’ll have a permanent role in San Antonio’s starting lineup, thriving alongside Wemby and De’Aaron Fox.
Loser: (Props in) The Dunk Contest
Mac McClung is a gravity-defying folk hero who will go down as one of the all-time great dunk contest performers in history. He deserved to win on Saturday night, hopping over a car, clearing Evan Mobley, and leaping over a guy on a hoverboard and staying airborne long enough to cram a ball off a feed from a guy on a ladder with his left hand while dunking with his right. It’s all theater. It’s all magical. It’s all fun.
Now, without sounding too much like a hater, it was hard for me not to watch McClung’s prop-heavy show and ignore the prop-heavy dissonance it created next to the (dare I use the word you’re about to read) purity of Castle’s own spectacle. For the San Antonio rookie, it was just him, the ball, and the basket. It was evocative and offbeat, deserving of more love than the judges awarded in the final round.
It called to mind the show-stopping extravaganza directed by Vince Carter in Oakland 25 years ago. Castle’s dunks weren’t as breathtaking, but the bare athleticism was similar. It also reminded me of JaVale McGee and DeMar DeRozan getting low-key robbed in 2011 by Blake Griffin. (McGee did bring out an extra basket to dunk two balls on the same jump, but no Kias were involved.) I don’t want to say “ban props!” because sometimes they elevate greatness to a level it couldn’t otherwise reach. (Gerald Green’s cupcake dunk deserved a Medal of Freedom.) But I do advocate for some kind of cap on the foolishness.
Winner: Victor Wembanyama’s Looming Reign
Things really kicked off during his press conference on Saturday afternoon, when Wemby made several of his trademark confident, eyebrow-raising comments. “The goal is not to chill, for sure,” he said, responding to a question about whether he’d try his hardest on Sunday night. “I’m not here to make friends. I know not everybody thinks like that, but what’s for sure is I’m trying to … I have some questions for some of the greats, the OGs, but I’m definitely not here to make friends.”
When the game started, Wemby immediately backed up that sentiment by playing harder than any All-Star (not named Giannis Antetokounmpo) in at least five years. The defense was on display. Wemby broke up a lob to Jalen Williams, blocked Cade Cunningham’s dunk attempt, and forced Jalen Brunson to make “a Ben Simmons type of pass” according to the writer who shall not be named and sat next to me on press row. It was awesome, and made everyone else on the court go almost as hard, with the same effort he’s had all season long for the San Antonio Spurs.
While LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant were deservedly lauded all weekend for transformative, revolutionary careers that forever changed the sport of basketball while boosting the NBA’s global reach and economic trajectory, it also felt like an opportunity for Wemby to take the baton and potentially run even farther with it. An exchange on Saturday between Anthony Edwards and the media really summed that part of it up.
Reporter: Do you consider yourself a top candidate to be the next face of the league?
Ant: No, not really.
Reporter: Why?
Ant: That’s what they got Wemby for.
Loser: The Kia Skills Challenge
With all due respect, the skills challenge is a useless and irrelevant waste of time. By Sunday morning, it’s memory-holed by everyone who watched (read: had it on in the background while they mindlessly scrolled). CP and Wemby treated it with the respect it deserves, getting disqualified for hacking the competition and marking the most unforgettable moment in skills challenge history. That … is not a compliment! If you disagree with any of this, without looking it up, please tell me who won last year’s competition. How about the year before that? Oh, you don’t know? My point exactly!
Winner: Everyone’s Dream of Someday Replacing the Skills Challenge With a One-on-One Contest
This needs to happen. Watching Napheesa Collier beat Aaliyah Edwards on Friday night at the Unrivaled’s one-on-one tournament was terrific. (Edwards dominated two-time WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart 12-0 a few days prior.)
Holding a similar event at NBA All-Star Weekend would be a remarkable shot of adrenaline to a Saturday night festivity that’s grown stale. Imagine a 10-player tournament held on Friday and Saturday night, with the championship round taking place at halftime of the actual All-Star Game? How has this not happened yet?
Several players were asked to daydream about it over the past few days. Kevin Durant said himself, Wembanyama, and Jayson Tatum would be the hardest to beat. Imagine getting to watch Shai Gilgeous-Alexander square off against Anthony Edwards. Or Nikola Jokic face Giannis Antetokounmpo? Or Jaylen Brown go up against Donovan Mitchell? Kyrie Irving versus Steph Curry!!!
Who wouldn’t want to watch that? And, in practice, much like every other event, it wouldn’t even need to feature actual All-Stars! Get a sponsor to cut a giant $1 million check and see which NBA players sign up to compete against each other.
“If I had the chance to play one-on-one with anybody, I would love to do it,” Antetokounmpo said on Sunday. “Anything that can make the weekend more exciting, more fun for the viewers, for the fans and for the players, I would love to participate.
“I think sometimes you forget, to be a good one-on-one player, you’ve got to be able to play both ways,” he said. “You’ve got to get a stop to get the ball. You don’t get a stop, you’re not getting the ball. It’s kind of hard, say, if Kyrie is going against Wemby. He’s got to get a stop. It would be must-see entertainment. It would be fun. I would love to participate if next year there’s a one-on-one tournament. I would love to participate.”
Loser: Andre Jackson Jr.
When you feel genuinely bad for an All-Star Saturday night participant, something went terribly wrong. Jackson’s dunks were antsy misfires that lacked imagination and foresight. You felt, watching them live, that he had just as much a chance of winning the 3-point contest. They also made me want to see the official list of slam dunk candidates who turned down the NBA’s invitation to participate. How far did the league have to go before it got to Action Jackson? Let the people know! Let’s have more transparency!
Winner: Chris Paul, Machiavellian Puppet Master
As he watched Wembanyama speed through the skills challenge by intentionally missing shots off a ball rack, Turner play-by-play announcer Kevin Harlan said, matter-of-factly, what was going through the audience’s collective mind: “This has Chris Paul’s fingerprints all over it.”
Paul is a stickler for the rules. Maniacally. Legendarily. Shamelessly. He does not care what you think of him. He wants to win and will do anything in his power to make that happen. (Including, infamously, five years ago when he snitched on Jordan Bell for illegally subbing into a game with his jersey untucked, drawing a delay of game penalty, and awarding Paul’s Thunder a free throw. OKC went on to win in overtime.)
It’s normally a grating quality, but it peaked for all the right reasons when he and Wemby made a mockery of the skills challenge on Saturday night. And then the Spurs decided to turn the whole thing into one big joke. (Which, to be crystal clear, it is!)
Wembanyama eventually took credit for the high jinks. Draymond Green later backed up the claim. And if you watch closely, right after he makes his final layup, a chuckling CP3 taps Wemby on the chest and then points back at him, as if to indicate it was all his teammate’s idea. But, speaking as someone who was not born yesterday, I stand with the observation Harlan made in real time. Even if this was Wembanyama’s grand plan, there would’ve been a fraction of a percent of a chance that he would act on it if he had been partnered with somebody else.
Loser: The New All-Star Game Format
The All-Star Game is broken and the NBA is desperate to fix it. There are some, like Draymond Green, who aren’t a huge fan of the new format. His words throughout the weekend were a tad hyperbolic and off-putting, though. Reasonable minds are prone to disagree. And after watching the new format play out from my seat on press row, it’s hard to feel too much enthusiasm either way about the basketball that was played. For what it is, the games were fine.
Relative to the competitive juice seen in a typical professional basketball game, the effort level on Sunday night was pitiful. Relative to the past few All-Star Games, this one had more juice than we’ve seen in quite some time. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams each blocked a jumper in the first few minutes of the opening contest. Wembanyama tried really hard and was visibly tired by the end of the championship round. Then the championship game happened and a grueling 20-minute break to commemorate Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ernie Johnson drained all the momentum, energy, and meaning out of the actual on-court product and it quickly devolved into an unserious exhibition, with Steph Curry taking half-court shots (he made one!) and transition defense no longer existing. No one was a fan of that.
“It was kind of tough to get back into the game after that,” Tatum said. “If they could just find a way to not have that long intermission in between the games or during the game, I think it would be a lot better.” Added Gilgeous-Alexander: “I would rather play without breaks.”
Again, nobody should be super mad about any of this. It’s fine. We’re talking about an All-Star Game. The format wasn’t so much a problem as how it was presented. Regardless, here’s a prediction: Next year we get another format tweak and see Team USA take on Team International. There’s more than enough talent to make something like that work, even if it would come with at least one built-in controversy (the event could no longer claim to include the world’s 24 best players, because there are way more than 12 guys born in the United States who would otherwise be invited to play).
The moral of the story: Adam Silver can’t make everybody happy.
