MUELLER'S HOT TAKES FROM NBA ALL-STAR WEEKEND

by Ryan Mueller

The NBA had its 72nd All-Star Weekend from Feb. 17 to 19, and I’m here to give you my thoughts. The main events of the weekend included a celebrity game, the skills challenge, the three-point competition, the dunk contest, and of course the All-Star game. While all of these events sound entertaining, the weekend could be summed up as average at best. NBA fans alike tend to agree and find themselves disappointed year in and year out. This is what I believe is wrong with All-Star Weekend

and what could fix these problems.

I want to begin with the skills competition. You might be reading this and thinking, “What’s the skills competition?” and with that question alone, you’ve proved why it needs to be removed from the entertainment roster. I’ll keep it short and sweet: no one cares about a skills competition that involves NBA athletes. We already know they have unbelievable talent - that’s why they’re in the NBA in the first place. Why should I waste my time watching an event targeted towards something that’s fundamentally executed in every NBA game?

Now I want to take a look at the celebrity game, and it should be cut for similar reasons as that God-forsaken skills challenge; no one cares. Sure, the idea of watching some A-list celebrities play each other in basketball sounds entertaining until you look at the roster. The roster featured a few exciting names, like 21 Savage, DK Metcalf, and Calvin Johnson, but once you take a deeper look at who else is playing, you can come to the conclusion that even you have a shot at playing next year. If I wrote out all of the irrelevant celebrities that made the roster this year, my editor would scrap this article. So I’ll just highlight a few of these Z listers. We’ve got Nicky Jam, Hasan Minhaj, Ranveer Singh, Marcos Mion, Ozuna, and THE Alex Toussaint. The overwhelming amount of irrelevance is staggering. That last guy that was mentioned is a Peleton instructor. Yes, you read that right, a workout instructor for exercise bikes made the list of celebrities for the All-Star game.

It’s time for me to tear apart the dunk contest now, and let me just say that I’m baffled that some of these guys are even playing in the NBA. They had to go grab a player from the G league just to fill a spot, and he won. Mac McClung winning the dunk contest is the only thing keeping this All-Star Weekend from being the worst one yet. The dunk contest used to feature the greatest athletes in the NBA like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, but now current stars are too scared of injury to compete. If the rosters don’t improve, they need to be scrapped.

My solutions to these problems are simple: cut the boring events and replace them with something new. I believe that an entertaining event would be 1v1 competitions, king of the hill style. You can watch your favorite NBA players face off one on one; the winner stays on the court and the loser goes home. In the end, only one All-Star remains. Don’t think this would be entertaining? Tell me you wouldn’t want to see Russell Westbrook face off against Kevin Durant.