Dieter Kurtenbach: Time for NBA to scrap All-Star weekend

The Warriors, San Francisco, and the Bay Area will host the 2025 NBA All-Star Game next February. It should be the last. No, not the last time for the Bay — the last NBA All-Star Game in any city, town or municipality worldwide. This is a tradition that has reached its expiration date. That date might have been a decade ago. There are three main prongs to an All-Star Weekend, and each of them has proven to be a made-for-TV waste of time. The Rising Stars game is a nice idea that the league has jammed onto Friday night, before anyone of serious importance arrives in town. I don't know a soul who has ever claimed to have watched it in an unprofessional context. Keeping All-Star weekend together for the kids doesn't make any sense. So scratch Friday. Saturday isn't worth the trouble, either. The only worthwhile event amid all the skills challenges is the 3-point contest, and that has lost its luster because every single NBA game is a 3-point contest. Hey, NBA — we're covered on threes. Plus, Steph Curry decided to supersede that event with his own sharpshooting contest — Stephen vs. Sabrina was a better show than whatever Damian Lillard won Saturday. It's also an event that would have carried just as much interest and intrigue if it was a made-for-TV 30-minute special shot at the Warriors' former practice facility in Oakland with some kids as the crowd. And would anyone care if we never did the pass-it-into-some-circles challenge again? The cardinal event of Saturday night is the dunk contest, which is now a lame parade of props, unoriginal ideas and G-Leaguers. The ABA started the dunk contest in 1976, but Saturday night, the best anyone could do was dunk over Shaq. Two dunkers did that. It was pretty meh the first time it happened. It's clear that after a half-century, all the possible dunks have been done. Jaylen Brown's high-school class project dunks were cringeworthy. The judges were deranged. Just let Mac McClung be a YouTube star — he'd probably make more money than what the Osceola Magic pay him. The dunk contest peaked in Oakland in 2000. (A dunk contest I caught on NBA TV the other day and watched from start to finish. Kenny Smith was also awful on that broadcast.) Vince Carter was right then: It's over. So scratch Saturday, too. But what the NBA really needs to scrap is the actual All-Star Game. When was the last time it was worthwhile for anyone involved — players, fans, the league? It certainly wasn't this past Sunday. The All-Star Game has become a farce of a basketball game: guys chucking up shots from half-court and trying stupid dunks, all while not even a sniff of defense can be found. Our expectations for a glorified pickup game were low, but my goodness. The All-Star Game has all the integrity of a bunch of sixth-graders when the coach is late for practice. Even commissioner Adam Silver couldn't hide his disgust at the end of the contest Sunday. "And to the Eastern Conference All-Stars, you scored the most points … well… congratulations," Silver said as he unenthusiastically handed the winner's trophy to Giannis Antetokounmpo. It's understandable things have reached this nadir. The players — the folks who have actually to do the thing — don't want to get injured and don't want to expend any energy on what should be their weekend off. Why would they try? We've had a bad product for decades now, and no number of format changes — the NBA has tried nearly everything to fix the weekend and the game — has helped. The whole spectacle has only gotten worse. Since next year's game in San Francisco is already on the books, the NBA should go through with it and tell the world, "This is it." Maybe that will create something worthwhile. Probably not. The NBA has created an "exhibition" of worth recently, though — the in-season tournament. The semifinals and final of that tournament, played in Las Vegas this past December, are the only three games on the league's schedule on their respective Thursdays and Saturdays. If the NBA (foolishly) wants to keep any All-Star weekend events around — be that the 3-point contest, the dunk contest or even the Rising Stars game — doing them on the Friday night between the final two rounds of the in-season tournament could be the play. (I'm sure the G-Leaguers will be available and the only college football that weekend is Army-Navy.) They can also move that event from town to town, effectively rewarding cities for building new arenas. Getting rid of the week-long All-Star break would allow the league to stretch its schedule to possibly remove most back-to-back games. Getting rid of an awful entertainment product might make the NBA's actual product — the games — better. Plus, the NFL already took Christmas from the NBA. It's going to take President's Day weekend soon enough, anyway. The NBA might as well have one last hurrah (or dud) in San Francisco, concede the war to the monolith, and start building up something new in mid-December. At least the in-season tournament weekend would have a worthwhile basketball game. And that is something the All-Star Game hasn't provided in a long, long time.