INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Saving the best for last won’t be enough to save the NBA from its own identity crisis.
While the league enjoyed a pulse during Sunday’s finale, the bulk of NBA fans still spent the weekend wondering why we even bother to tune in.
And at such a strange hour of the day, too.
What An Experience That Was … 2026 All-Star Weekend Recap
There was a time when All-Star Weekend was absolute appointment television.
Think back to 1988, when Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins turned the Dunk Contest into a heavyweight title fight that had every NBA fan in America glued to their seat.
Fans once cleared their calendars and stocked the fridge to watch the best of each conference go at it, or to watch high-flying All-Stars dazzle in the Dunk Contest.
LeBron James at The 2026 NBA All-Star Game held at the Intuit Dome on February 15, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images)
I’m here to tell you that the NBA All-Star Game’s new format was actually an improvement on the product, if we’re solely talking about the Game and not the dumpster fire that is All-Star Weekend. But let’s not get it twisted: this was a slightly successful experiment, not a total win.
Sunday’s “Three-For-All”: Competitive, Not Complete
Improved effort and a lively crowd at Intuit Dome headlined Sunday’s Game, which pitted Team USA (split into two teams, Stripes and Stars) in a “three-for-all” with Team World.
This was a desperate pivot to capture some of that Olympic lightning, and for a few minutes (thanks to Kawhi Leonard), it actually worked.
The weekend’s All-Star Game trophy eventually went to Team Stars.
The Stars won an overtime thriller against Team World in Game 1 and later cruised past the Stripes 47-21 in the final after the veteran “Old Heads” ran out of gas.
Anthony Edwards for USA Stars; Timberwolves guard receives Most Valuable Player (MVP). (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The Stripes seemed more deserving for the bulk of the contests.
Kawhi Leonard turned back the clock in his own building, dropping 31 points in a single 12-minute stretch to send the Stripes to the final.
However, the Stars’ late surge, led by MVP Anthony Edwards, proved that when you give these players a reason to care, they will actually play basketball. It was a “win” only because the bar has been buried in the basement for years.
The Friday Night Flop: The Meme-ification of Basketball
The larger picture poses concern about the future of All-Star Weekend, since everything that preceded Sunday’s Game was as refreshing as water out of the Los Angeles River.
Friday’s events were split between the Celebrity All-Star Game and the Rising Stars Challenge, both resulting in massive flops that produced nothing more than a week’s worth of “meme-able” clips.
The Celebrity Game reached a new low with an embarrassing outing by ESPN’s so-called basketball expert, Shams Charania, who finished with a goose egg in scoring.
Seeing a guy who lives for Twitter notifications go 0-for-6 while checking his phone on the sideline is the exact opposite of why people used to clear their Friday nights. It’s about time we stop pretending to care about these celebrities.
Then there was the Rising Stars challenge. It ushered four teams of complete no-names to play for no other reason than to generate an extra day of revenue.
Despite trying to gather hype, the arena was ghost-town quiet.
Honestly, more people could’ve been found outside Intuit Dome than inside it. In terms of atmosphere, the “vibe” was nonexistent.
Saturday’s Slog: No One Won, Just People Losing
Saturday night was where the wheels really came off. The night began with the Shooting Stars competition, but the real “losing” happened in the 3-Point Contest.
Damian Lillard “won” his third title, though the victory felt hollow.
Lillard hasn’t played a single minute for the Blazers this season as he recovers from a torn Achilles. The league gave him “special approval” to compete just to have a name people recognized.
“Dame Time” edged out Devin Booker 29-27 in a final that felt more like a survival mission. It wasn’t about Lillard winning; it was about the other seven active, healthy players losing to a guy on one leg.
Then came the NBA’s biggest Saturday night flop in years. Losing all intrigue in the All-Star Dunk Contest is something the NBA needs to recoup with haste.
No one’s heard of Keshad Johnson, the Heat forward who took the trophy. Johnson has logged barely 250 minutes of NBA action. (I.e., we need more stars participating.)
When the “highlight” is a dunk that takes four tries to finish, the spectacle is dead. Watching one of the contestants, Jase Richardson, botch an attempt and land on his head was a perfect microcosm of the weekend.
Jase Richardson of the Orlando Magic falls in the second round during the Slam Dunk competition during NBA All-Star Saturday at Intuit Dome. (Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
Fans sat through an obscene number of misses, and despite the pulsating lights throughout Intuit, the evident signs of the decline in quality were hard to ignore.
Adam Silver, Fix It Or Quit It
Adam Silver found a format that works for 48 minutes on Sunday. But he still has 48 hours of garbage to clean up. By showing us that a competitive game is possible, the league has removed its own excuses.
The “Three-For-All” saved the weekend from being a total catastrophe, but it also highlighted the massive gap between Sunday night and the unwatchable sludge that comes before it. The clock is ticking for 2027’s Weekend in Phoenix.
If they don’t fix the Dunk Contest and stop casting reporters in the Celebrity Game, Sunday’s “little win” will be nothing more than a smaller stain in the league’s declining legacy.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver speaks at a press conference during 2026 NBA All-Star Weekend (Photo by Ryan Sirius Sun/Getty Images)
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