Recently the NBA announced that the Rookie-Sophomore game — actually called the Rising Stars Challenge — played on Friday night of every All-Star weekend, will be getting a bit more attention this year with the addition of a playground-style system for picking squads headed up by ‘general managers’ Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal, who will each select their own nine man units.
Basically, the NBA is just going to get let Inside the NBA, the league’s most popular studio show, take the reins over for this game in the hopes that viewers will at the least tune in for the selection process and banter that will accompany it. Kenny Smith serving as the Honorary Commissioner of this whole thing likely just means he’s going to get the conversations started between the two outspoken big men, though it’s hard to believe they’ll need much assistance.
For a game often lauded as an Even Worse All-Star Game, with the lack of defense of any sort, sloppy, slapstick play and a whole ‘lotta dunks (though, really, what are you looking for here?) this sort of change to the system is perfect for generating some interest around an event that is largely forgotten during a weekend that features the dunk contest, always swirling trade rumors, and the actual All-Star game.
Barkley and Shaq will pick their teams a week or so before the actual game — wouldn’t it be great if the entire pool of players were on set with them when the teams were picked? That would be true playground fashion — and then coach with Steve Kerr and Mike Fratello, who are serving as assistants. Yup, the TNT gang’s all here. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, though with Shaq and Charles, you kind of know what to expect; the whole thing will be worth watching for novelty alone, and it’s nice to see the NBA trying something new (although the NHL has done this for its All-Star game the past two seasons).
The game itself though has a ceiling; the Shaq/Charles dynamic will draw some, the way the rosters will be hand-picked will too, but in the end it’s still just the Rising Stars Challenge on a Friday night of All-Star Weekend. It’s a good but virtually risk-free venue to test a new system like this, but the real hope this brings is that someday the real All-Star game rosters can be decided in such fashion.
This would likely require breaking down more traditional elements, such as conference affiliations, but seeing All-Stars get picked, passed over and playing potentially against teammates — not to mention how the teams would actually get selected themselves, as naming captains from the league and letting them choose would add yet another element of intrigue — would just be great fun.
The NBA’s cast of characters as a whole is tops among the major North American sports, and everything that could possibly come along with All-Stars getting chosen by somebody — the slights, the chips on shoulders, the favoritism, the fuel for the fire towards one exhibition game that could be generated — are potential for giving a game that generally only gets interesting in the second part of the fourth quarter some sort of stakes throughout.
We’ll see how the process goes with the Rising Stars Challenge and Shaq and Charles first. For now, it’s something exciting and different to talk about leading up to this season’s All-Star break. With any luck, this is only the beginning of a bigger plan from the NBA.
Griffin Gotta contributes to The Hoop Doctors and is a co-managing editor of Straight Outta Vancouver. The story arcs and infinite weirdness of the NBA are addictions he deals with every day. Email him at griffingotta at gmail dot com.
