Did Stephen Curry ruin the All-Star Game, too?

The NBA's crisis of plenty.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

---

The Procuress; Dirck van Baburen; 1622

I watched the NBA All-Star Game offline and delayed. (I stopped to watch one commercial. See you in March, Kong and Godzilla.) As I watched the glory that is a lot of absurd threes and comic relief from Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic, I wondered what the discourse would be.

Just kidding. As soon as the East hit 100 points in the first half I knew what the discourse would be: too many points.

And sure enough, after the East finished with a record 211 points (!), that was the dominant conversation to the point where folks were even assessing Adam Silver’s trophy presentation mode as annoyed.

“Well, congratulations.”

This is related to Silver’s claim on Saturday that, with the return to the traditional All-Star format this year, he expected a good game. He was not right about that. The game was pretty much a blowout throughout because of the same exact reason many modern NBA games are blowouts: one team was smokin’ hot from deep, and the other was not. Damian Lillard and Tyrese Haliburton (the MVP and runner-up) alone hit 21 threes for the East; the entire West roster hit 25 in 71 attempts.

You cannot legislate your way to a close game in the modern NBA. It’s not possible. Frankly, I thought that was part of the reason the NBA, in recent years, had deconstructed the All-Star Game into individual quarters, resetting the score to 0-0 at the breaks, to obfuscate that these games are regularly non-competitive. And I thought the target score (or Elam ending) was created specifically to prevent a team from hitting 200 points in a game, which seemed like a red line the NBA league office was terrified of crossing. Under the 24-point Elam ending, so long as a team didn’t hit 176 points in three quarters, they couldn’t hit 200. But in the name of getting back to basics, the NBA eliminated the quarter resets and the Elam ending in 2024.

Well, you take away those tricks and this is what you get.

All of this has a very clear cause, of course: the Steph Curry-led three-point explosion has completely changed basketball. Mike Prada wrote an entire (excellent) book about it! The All-Star Game is not immune to impacts. These knock-on effects are different because of the defensive intensity (or lack thereof) in the All-Star Game. But there are real impacts.

And before I start rattling them off, look at this chart and let me know if you can tell when Steph Curry got famous.

That’s exactly the point at which All-Star scores exploded.

In the 11 years preceding Curry’s first All-Star berth, players took an average of 51 three-pointers in the All-Star Game each year. In the 11 years since, there have been an average of 131 threes taken in the All-Star Game. This is an exaggerated reflection of what’s happened in the actual league.

Steph Curry has been blamed for ruining the NBA, ruining youth basketball, ruining pick-up basketball, ruining the hopes and dreams of multiple rival fanbases. Why not blame him for ruining the All-Star Game, too?

So what happens when everyone is taking threes? Well, the frequency of shots being strongly challenged goes down.

For every deep or open three being taken, you reduce the number of potential impact defensive plays by one. There are simply very few opportunities for blocks in the All-Star Game these days. Notably on Sunday, Curry got one of the three recorded on a putback attempt by Paolo Banchero.

Anthony Davis also recorded a block on Banchero. Jayson Tatum got a block on Kevin Durant. Good job, guys.

The other really striking change over the years of the three-point revolution is that fouling and free throws are basically not a thing in the All-Star Game anymore. I think this is related to a variety of factors: lower defensive intensity due to the high propensity for long threes, minimal one-on-one play inside the arc, a move away from playing big men high minutes, the high frequency of fast breaks and the fact that so many of these games become blow-outs.

There were only three fouls called on Sunday. There have been fewer than 10 in each of the past three All-Star Games. Meanwhile, refs called an averaged of 29 fouls per All-Star Game in the Aughts.

If you’re not defending close, you’re not getting whistled. If your opponent is taking a 35-footer or breaking out in transition by himself, you’re not defending close. It’s all related.

Here’s the thing: are we sure fans hate this as much as the professionally obligated viewers do? Again, it is impossible to mandate a close game in any basketball contest. And due to three-pointer variability, you are more likely to have blow-outs these days than in the two-pointer and free throw heavy past. Given that, what’s more exciting to the everyday fan: inverted side pick-and-rolls and Spain action or a sequence in which Luka bonks a self alley-oop followed by Dame draining a 50-foot bomb?

In what world do we think fans want fewer points, especially if those points aren’t coming from the free throw line?

With the addition of the three-pointer in high frequency to the normal NBA game, defenses have had to get more complex to try to cover the court. Players are asked to do much more intellectually and have a more varied set of responsibilities on defense by necessity than they did in the past, when the game was more constrained on defending one-on-one, covering pick-and-rolls and helping on penetration. How in the heck are All-Star coaches supposed to import a complex defensive system into the All-Star setting? It’s impossible. And since teams aren’t running any semblance of normal offense, it’s useless. What’s the solution here? Trap Dame when he crosses midcourt … so he can pass to Haliburton or Giannis with a man advantage?

This is all to say that there is no path to fixing the All-Star Game as it currently exists. The NBA should be throwing gimmicks at it every year, not stripping the good gimmicks away in the name of returning to tradition and, hopefully, close competition. The Rising Stars format (four teams, single-elimination) could be interesting for the main game. Or a 3-on-3 tournament. (That’s the closest we’ll ever get to the much-discussed 1-on-1 tournament.) Or 5-on-5 King of the Court where different players get to be captains in order of fan vote results.

You’re not going to shame NBA All-Stars into doing something that isn’t really possible, which is to play hard defense in a game in which the opponent is taking 97 threes and running in transition the rest of the time. And you’re not going to draw fans in by telling them you’re going to legislate out all the points. Find a new slant. Mix it up more than ever.

---

All-Star Game Disappointment Rankings

3. Nikola Jokic. He really could not be arsed to be there. He tries more funky passes in actual games than in the All-Star Game. He should be White Chocolate-ing it out there. That said, Tim Duncan was the best player in the world for a while and was a boring All-Star, too.

2. Luka Doncic. His best highlight was actually him not trying very hard. Do you how hard it is to make people smile by half-assing it? I actually unapologetically love that. He does not care about this, at all! I think he would be embarrassed to have the All-Star MVP award in his home!

1. Anthony Edwards. So, Ant Man should want to excel in the All-Star Game, right? He’s kind of the perfect old-school All-Star player, which is to say he’s a bombastic, electric two-guard who loves dunking on opponents and trash-talking. He might as well have been Jamaal Magloire out there. Where’d all that juice go?! What happened to being the face of the league?!

---

Shout Out

Steph wanted to get it cooking but it wasn’t happening. Full effort early on from him. He realized his team didn’t have it so he backed up.

You know who played his tail off and didn’t solely rely on the three-pointer? KARL-ANTHONY TOWNS. Would-be All-Star Game savior if the East weren’t so hot from 30+ feet.

Hey, big KAT scored 50 without getting yanked down the stretch by Chris Finch. Kudos.

Dame tried to give the people what they want all weekend. Kudos.

Tyrese Haliburton really tried and should have been the MVP. Those 15 points in 90-something seconds had me losing my cool.

Clear MVP of the weekend.

Back to the lab on the elbow pass, Rese.

He cares, he’s a showman and he’s an excellent player. Maybe he’s the successor to Curry as one of the faces of the league? Why not?

---

The Dunk Contest

… is irredeemable. One good dunk (Mac McClung’s first one) the entire show.

Hali’s dunk in the Skills Challenge was the second best dunk of the night. They have to keep trying to fix it, but they basically need a Zach LaVine, Aaron Gordon or Blake Griffin to descend from the heavens like manna to fix this thing.

---

Hey, League Office, While I’m Complaining …

No tiebreakers on All-Star Saturday. The Skills Challenge passing round had a tiebreaker. No! The Three-Point Shoot-out had a tiebreaker. No! No tiebreakers.

---

And Finally

In Friday’s newsletter, I said that the only thing I was excited about all weekend was the Steph vs. Sabrina Shoot-Out. Sure enough, that was by far the best event of the weekend, and it wasn’t close.

You can see Steph bounce between delight and nerves while watching Sabrina shoot. She damn near beat him. She still had the lead when he was down to his final two shots.

This is something the NBA and WNBA need to find a way to continue. The one issue is that Steph has a particular fame that isn’t really replicable with, say, two-time reigning shoot-out champ Dame. Can Steph just do this forever against all comers? Can the entire weekend just be Steph Curry shooting the basketball? Can Steph Curry save All-Star Weekend?

Wait … how did we end up here after all that?

---

Be excellent to each other.