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When the NBA announced last season that the All-Star teams would be picked by two captains, everybody had pretty much the same reaction: Great idea, but why isn’t it televised?
The All-Star Game badly needed a shake-up. The weekend has created lots of memorable moments, but when was the last time anyone talked about the game itself? With the exception of first-time honorees and players like Russell Westbrook who don’t know how not to go 100 percent, most players are too injury-averse to risk putting in much effort on the court. The last truly indelible All-Star Game moment came in 2009 when Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant were named co-MVPs and gave an awkward press conference pretending they didn’t still hate each other.
This year, the NBA listened to everyone’s requests and took the extra step of televising the draft. Sort of.
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The broadcast began with a hype video mostly consisting of clips of heavy hitters like LeBron James and Rachel Nichols imploring the league to broadcast the draft, as if to say: We heard you.
What resulted was more or less a conference call. The two captains, James and Giannis Antetokounmpo, FaceTimed into the TNT studio with the Inside the NBA crew and took turns picking teams. Both made the picks you’d expect—James took Kyrie Irving and Dwyane Wade, Antetokounmpo took teammate Khris Middleton as well as all five international players in the pool—as well as the ones designed to set up the most social-media jokes.
James took Kevin Durant first, perhaps a nod to Durant’s infamous December comments about the “toxic environment” James creates. He later took Russell Westbrook, just in case people still cared about the animosity between them following Durant’s departure from Oklahoma City in 2016.
His two headlining picks, of course, were Irving and Anthony Davis—Davis being his first choice among the reserves. This led to an exchange that was both hilarious and kind of stunning.
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Giannis accused Bron of tampering when he drafted AD
(via @NBAonTNT) https://t.co/CC6GXMpq3h
On Thursday morning, after spending the last week-plus blatantly attempting to engineer a trade of Davis to the Lakers, James denied trying to force any trades, telling reporters in Boston, “There’s nothing I need to get in this league that I don’t already have.” James’ and Davis’ mutual agent, Rich Paul, has made no secret of their desire to team up, and so it was no surprise that James took Davis first in the second round.
The exchange went like this:
Ernie Johnson: “You sure you want him to be your teammate?”
James: “Uh, you know, I’m very sure of that.”
Antetokounmpo: “Isn’t that tampering?”
Johnson: “Shots fired!”
James: “Tampering rules don’t apply on All-Star Weekend.”
When Antetokounmpo dropped the “tampering” line, he looked nervous, like when you want to make fun of a friend for something sensitive but don’t quite know whether you’re crossing a line. He displayed an unexpected instinct for gamesmanship when he drafted Ben Simmons, another of James’ fellow Klutch clients. James pretended to be thrown off. Laughs were had.
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Overall, Antetokounmpo played up his nice-boy persona. He drafted Curry first because Curry drafted him last year. He took Middleton, a first-time All-Star, as his first reserve with Davis, Klay Thompson and Damian Lillard still on the board. He complimented each of James’ first few picks. He took Paul George as one of his starters and dropped a self-deprecating reference to George’s recent poster dunk over him.
Even the first-ever All-Star draft-day trade of Westbrook for Simmons was an obvious joke setup, allowing James to reunite the Klutch mafia and making Westbrook and Joel Embiid teammates after their recent back-and-forth.
Antetokounmpo is too nice to be a GM—when James proposed the trade, he jokingly suggested James throw in Wade. He should have been serious about the request and forced James to choose between his Klutch family and the Banana Boat Squad. The next time there’s an All-Star draft trade, someone should throw in a future first-round pick or a Celebrity Game player to be named later.
The All-Star draft telecast was entertaining and hit all the right notes, but it was an incremental step toward the ideal version of what was a very good idea. It didn’t help things, either, that it took place hours after the trade deadline as fans were still processing their favorite teams’ moves. By the time the game rolls around on Feb. 17, no one will remember Giannis’ tampering joke or LeBron’s trade proposal.
If the NBA wants to make the draft an event, go all the way. Make it part of All-Star Saturday night so the captains and players can all be there in person to react to being picked. Better yet, do it on the court on Sunday right before the game tips off so the snubs and rivalries are fresh in everyone’s minds.
That’s one way to make players take the game seriously.
Sean Highkin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. He is currently based in Portland. Follow him on Twitter at @highkin.
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