I watched the NBA All-Star Game last night at Ray Kowalczyk’s place, and it took us until the second commercial break to figure out there were four teams. Four. Ray squinted at the screen and asked if one of them was the Pelicans. I told him no, that’s the squad TNT picked, and that one over there in the lighter jerseys is the squad Shaq picked, and the kids in the corner doing layup lines are the Rising Stars, who I guess are now part of this. Ray turned the volume down and asked if anybody at the league office had ever seen a basketball game before.
The format, in case you were lucky enough to miss it, is a mini-tournament. Four teams, games to a target score, somebody hits forty and the buzzer goes off like it’s the end of a YMCA Saturday-morning run. Coach DiMaggio used to say if you can’t fill forty-eight minutes you should be selling insurance. The NBA has decided forty-eight minutes is too much insurance for one Sunday.
The first “game” ended 41-25 in about the time it takes to boil pasta. Somebody dunked. Somebody else did the thing where they pass it off the backboard to themselves, which used to be a dunk contest move and is now apparently a regular-possession move because nobody is guarding anyone. Charles Barkley said the word “turrible” three times. They cut to commercial. We didn’t know who was winning, who was playing, or who’d already been eliminated. Ray went and got more pretzels.
There were three halftime shows. Three. One per matchup. A young woman whose name I did not catch performed on what I am told was a hoverboard, though to my eye it was a regular stage with a fan blowing her hair. A second act involved a DJ behind a desk shaped like a sneaker. By the third intermission I had stopped asking questions and started doing a crossword.
Ray’s grandson Petey Corrigan came by around the second tournament round. Petey is twenty-two and works in something he calls “creator marketing,” which as best I can tell means he gets paid to be on his phone in a room with other people on their phones. Petey watched about ninety seconds of the broadcast and explained to me, with the gentle patience of a man explaining a microwave to a parakeet, that the All-Star Game is “for engagement, not basketball.” The dunk contest, he said, “lives on TikTok now.” The game itself was “a content delivery vehicle.”
I asked Petey who won. He said the brands won. I asked him which brands. He said all of them. I asked him if anyone on the court was trying. He said trying was “a vibe choice.” Ray got up to check on the dog.
Now I will say this, because I am a fair man and I respect the work. Anthony Edwards looked like he wanted to be there. He played a couple of possessions that resembled basketball as I learned it — closing out on a shooter, getting low, finishing through contact instead of around it. For about ninety seconds in the third mini-final he and Jokić ran a high pick-and-roll the way you’d run it in a real game in May, and the broadcast cut away from it to show a celebrity reaction shot of a man I did not recognize wearing sunglasses indoors. That was the All-Star Game for me. Ninety seconds, then sunglasses.
The whole thing wrapped up well under three hours, which the league will tell you is a feature. They’ll tell you the players love it, the format keeps things “fresh,” the ratings were up among the demo that does not actually watch basketball. They will not tell you that the score of the championship game was 42-35 and that nobody on the floor broke a sweat hard enough to require a towel. They will not tell you that the MVP trophy was handed out by a man in a sneaker costume.
Coach DiMaggio, God rest him, used to make us run suicides if we loafed on a single defensive possession in a scrimmage. A scrimmage. Not the showcase event of an entire professional league. I would like to send the current NBA office a videotape of one of those practices, except they would not know what a videotape was, and they would inform me that suicides are now called “intentional conditioning intervals” and live on a wellness app.
Ray’s calling later to watch the Daytona 500. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.