The NBA All-Star has grown very stale in recent years as players and fans seem uninterested and the game has not been the exciting culmination of a fun weekend that it used to be.
The NBA is about to change that and is completely switching the manner in which teams will be made for the 2018 NBA All-Star Game.
The NBA is changing the All Star game format. Now the 2 players with the most votes in each conference will be aloud to be captains! No more East vs West! pic.twitter.com/CscEzeMMFA
— NBA (@TheNBASoul) October 3, 2017
As you can see in the tweet above, the teams will be chosen by the captain or leading vote getter in each conference, which can lead to some hilarious situations and pettiness as LeBron inevitably passes up on Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant or Russell Westbrook passes up on one another.
The coolest addition is that each team will be playing for a specific charity.
Here is a breakdown of the new rules according to NBC Sports:
• The players who are the top vote-getter in each conference will be selected as the captains (last season that would have been LeBron James and Kevin Durant).
• The remaining eight starters will go into a “starters pool” and the captains will take turns choosing players. They are not bound by conference or anything else — this is like schoolyard pickup.
• The captains will then choose the rest of their teams from the “reserves pool” selected by the coaches, to round out the rosters of 12.
• Once chosen, each team will select a Los Angeles-area charity (this year, because that’s where the game is hosted) or national organization where donations will be used to support local efforts.
• The teams will still be coached by the coach of the team with the best record in each conference 14 days before the game (unless that coach did it the year before, then it goes to the coach of the team with the second-best record)
Overall I think this is a fun idea that will lead to more intrigue surrounding team selection (NBA players are a very prideful bunch). This will lead to a bunch of fun if not ridiculous stories of how the captains pick and whether you can read between the lines and make any free agency inferences based on these decisions. The charity aspect may also motivate the players in the actual game more (let’s be honest though, only a lot of money or bragging rights will really do that).
I think this decision is directly related to the migration of even more talent to the western conference this off-season and is clearly a savvy play by the NBA to play to the whole rumor mill of player relationships with one another and the constant ranking that takes place of the NBA’s elite that surrounds the NBA 24/7 these days.
The NBA is about to become even more cliquey…
