Players don’t compete because they don’t care. To fix this, the All-Star Game should impact players' chances of winning a championship. Let’s see what the math says.
I was just thinking about this the other day! I want to point out that out of the four major sports leagues in North America, football and basketball have a deeper inherit all-star indifference problem than baseball and hockey. This is because it's really hard to "not try" to play your best in baseball or in hockey. For baseball, pitchers don't deliberately toss the ball to the batter in the all-star game. They have to pitch as normal, and batters have to bat as normal. Plus, each player might get to play just one (or even half) inning, making the experience more precious for them and motivating them to make that inning count. For hockey, the sport is played on a low-friction surface already so even if you want to go slow, you can't. Also, you are on the ice for at most 30 seconds and it might be the only 30 seconds you will get for the entire game, so you are motivated to make it count.
Basketball and football, on the other hand, are not played on low-friction surfaces. It's okay for one to not play defense to reduce the risk of injury. This makes for boring games. The problem with NBA is that, for NFL, they figured out the situation and made the pro-bowl a casual flag-football event serving as an appetizer one week before the Superbowl. For NBA, it's still marketed as a marquee mid-season matchup. So, NBA has gotten the worst deal out of the four sports simply due to the nature of the game.
One risk with this proposal is that the a good performance in the All-Star game by the players from the weaker league would lead to even more skewed playoffs with 9 teams from the weaker league and only 7 teams from the stronger league.
To use your example of 2009-10, the East did win the All-Star Game. That would have removed the 50-32 Thunder from the playoffs, and included the 40-42 Raptors instead.
From Wikipedia : "the East winning in a closely contested game, 141–139, and the Miami Heat's Dwyane Wade being named the MVP." All the quarters were close too : "Scoring by quarter: 37–34, 39–35, 42–40, 23–30"
Even then, most of the players won't care. The NBA feels like one of the more predictable sports - you know going into the season who the top teams will be, and the top teams aren't going to care much about the 8th/9th seeds in their conference making the playoffs. A #1 seed has won 52 out of 78 championships; no 7th or 8th seed has ever won, and only 2 have made the championship, since the NBA expanded from a 12 team to a 16 team playoff 40 years ago.
If you want to make it competitive, tie bonuses to the All-Star game outcome, and make them large enough to be meaningful. I don't think it's in the competitive interest of the game to tie a team's fate to an exhibition game that they might not even have anybody participating in.
As for how to make the NBA all-star game more engaging, a plausible idea is to make it a pre-season event, sort of like the NBA new season kick-off. It's an exhibition game after all. The game can even be played overseas if global audiences are more interested in it. As for the mid-season tournament, the NBA already has an in-season tournament, so why not make the final game around where the all-star break is today?
This just isn’t true. The NHL all star game has been every bit as much of a joke as the NBA all star game. That’s one reason they’ve essentially eliminated it this year.
I was just thinking about this the other day! I want to point out that out of the four major sports leagues in North America, football and basketball have a deeper inherit all-star indifference problem than baseball and hockey. This is because it's really hard to "not try" to play your best in baseball or in hockey. For baseball, pitchers don't deliberately toss the ball to the batter in the all-star game. They have to pitch as normal, and batters have to bat as normal. Plus, each player might get to play just one (or even half) inning, making the experience more precious for them and motivating them to make that inning count. For hockey, the sport is played on a low-friction surface already so even if you want to go slow, you can't. Also, you are on the ice for at most 30 seconds and it might be the only 30 seconds you will get for the entire game, so you are motivated to make it count.
Basketball and football, on the other hand, are not played on low-friction surfaces. It's okay for one to not play defense to reduce the risk of injury. This makes for boring games. The problem with NBA is that, for NFL, they figured out the situation and made the pro-bowl a casual flag-football event serving as an appetizer one week before the Superbowl. For NBA, it's still marketed as a marquee mid-season matchup. So, NBA has gotten the worst deal out of the four sports simply due to the nature of the game.
One risk with this proposal is that the a good performance in the All-Star game by the players from the weaker league would lead to even more skewed playoffs with 9 teams from the weaker league and only 7 teams from the stronger league.
To use your example of 2009-10, the East did win the All-Star Game. That would have removed the 50-32 Thunder from the playoffs, and included the 40-42 Raptors instead.
I wonder if that outcome would have held up if there were real stakes. And if the East still won … that would have been hilariously awesome IMO!
Seems like it was a closely contested game.
From Wikipedia : "the East winning in a closely contested game, 141–139, and the Miami Heat's Dwyane Wade being named the MVP." All the quarters were close too : "Scoring by quarter: 37–34, 39–35, 42–40, 23–30"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9310_NBA_season#Notable_occurrences
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_NBA_All-Star_Game#Game
Random variance aside, I think the fundamental issue is that a weaker league can still have the better set of top players.
Even then, most of the players won't care. The NBA feels like one of the more predictable sports - you know going into the season who the top teams will be, and the top teams aren't going to care much about the 8th/9th seeds in their conference making the playoffs. A #1 seed has won 52 out of 78 championships; no 7th or 8th seed has ever won, and only 2 have made the championship, since the NBA expanded from a 12 team to a 16 team playoff 40 years ago.
If you want to make it competitive, tie bonuses to the All-Star game outcome, and make them large enough to be meaningful. I don't think it's in the competitive interest of the game to tie a team's fate to an exhibition game that they might not even have anybody participating in.
As for how to make the NBA all-star game more engaging, a plausible idea is to make it a pre-season event, sort of like the NBA new season kick-off. It's an exhibition game after all. The game can even be played overseas if global audiences are more interested in it. As for the mid-season tournament, the NBA already has an in-season tournament, so why not make the final game around where the all-star break is today?
This just isn’t true. The NHL all star game has been every bit as much of a joke as the NBA all star game. That’s one reason they’ve essentially eliminated it this year.