With the frenzy of the 2025 NBA trade deadline now behind us, the attention of the NBA-watching world now shifts to the Bay Area for the high-octane basketball exhibition/convention/trade show that is 2025 All-Star Weekend. Here are a few things to keep an eye on as the league’s best and brightest strut their stuff across three days of basketball-adjacent endeavors, social-media brand activation opportunities and fresh-coat-of-painted tournament-style play:
After the 2024 All-Star Game ended with the Eastern Conference scoring a record 211 points in a blowout victory that featured more from-the-logo launches than gestures in the direction of defense, NBA commissioner Adam Silver sounded decidedly un-psyched about what he’d just witnessed:
Silver was far from the only observer who saw in last year’s spectacle a continuation of a bummerific recent trend: a Sunday showcase that’s supposed to represent the crown jewel of a wall-to-wall weekend celebrating the very best the NBA has to offer instead devolving into little more than a 3-point-line-to-3-point-line jog-through.
This led the commissioner — who’s never met a traditional conceit he couldn’t endeavor to disrupt! — to consider a shake-up to the established structure of the All-Star Game that went beyond a televised player draft or a “USA vs. the World”-style shift. Silver evidently found his sought-after shuffle when Stephen Curry, of all people, shuffled into his office.
“I wanted to take the opportunity of Steph stopping by to say, ‘What’s the format that you would like to see that you think other All-Star players would like to see to create more of an entertaining and competitive game for the fans?’” Silver recently told Tim Kawakami of the San Francisco Standard. “And he said from his standpoint that maybe breaking up the game a bit, shorter games, multiple games, he thought was certainly of interest to him and he thought would be of interest to other players as well.”
From that conversation spawned the tournament-style structure we’ll see Sunday, featuring rosters drafted by TNT’s “Inside the NBA” crew. Four teams, three games, two rounds, one winner. There are no quarters, and no game clock; in each game, the first team to 40 wins, which, if nothing else, will prevent an unseemly final score like 211-186. (The NBA is putting 50 minutes between the alleged tipoff of each game; it’ll be interesting to see how closely they can stick to that, or if we’ll wind up with the kind of bloat that leads to the finale not starting until like 10:30 p.m. on the East Coast.)
In the first game, Kenny Smith’s “Young Stars” (Anthony Edwards, Jalen Brunson, Jaren Jackson Jr., Jalen Williams, Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, Cade Cunningham and Tyler Herro) will take on Charles Barkley’s “Global Stars” (Nikola Jokić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama, Pascal Siakam, Alperen Şengün, Karl-Anthony Towns, Donovan Mitchell, Trae Young). In the second, Shaquille O’Neal’s “OGs” (LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Jayson Tatum, Kevin Durant, Damian Lillard, James Harden, Jaylen Brown, Kyrie Irving) will play whichever team wins Friday’s Rising Stars Challenge, as helmed by Candace Parker.
The winner of Kenny vs. Chuck meets the winner of Shaq vs. Candace; the winner of that, I suppose, wins the All-Star Game — and, with it, $125,000 apiece. (Players on the second-place team get $50,000 a head; third- and fourth-place finishers get $25,000 each.)
(Taylar Sievert/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
Will shorter, quicker games with smaller rosters result in a more spirited level of play? Curry, at least, sounded an optimistic note.
“My advice [to Silver] was it’s not a bad thing to change it up entirely and try something new, knowing you can always come back to the traditional format if whatever you decide doesn’t work,” Curry recently told Kawakami. “And then, spitballing a bunch of different ideas to try and shorten the game a little bit, create a different kind of scenario where you can try and inspire some competition. Obviously it comes down to the players, whether you play or not, but I like where it’s at.”
And if there’s not enough juice to the games? Well, Kevin Hart’s going to be there, serving as the “first-ever on-court emcee” of the annual midseason exhibition and charged with adding “a layer of comedic disruption into the live game.” So I think we’re in pretty good hands, Getting Everybody to Take the All-Star Game More Seriously-wise.
You’re not going to believe this, but the answer is … 13 of 22! More than half! A robust shooting percentage of 59.1% — the same percentage that Warriors legend Andris Biedriņš shot during the 2009-10 season! An upset of titanic proportions!
As you surely remember, the 2024 Celebrity Game featured an MVP-winning performance by extremely strong Dallas Cowboys edge rusher Micah Parsons:
And who can forget WNBA star Kelsey Plum reading basketball YouTuber Tristan Jass for filth?
One can only assume that similar fireworks are in store for this year’s edition, featuring rosters coached by Bay Area icons Barry Bonds (with lead assistant 2 Chainz, who actually hooped at Alabama State) and Jerry Rice (aided by TikTok comedian Khaby Lame, who did not record “I’m Different,” which puts him at a competitive disadvantage).
As for the game itself, I think the likelihood of Druski and Kai Cenat teaming up for some kind of epic bit is pretty high. I’m holding out hope that WWE superstar Bayley and actor Pablo Schreiber strike up a meaningful friendship based on Schreiber’s respect for Bayley’s work post-Damage CTRL and Bayley’s love of Season 2 of “The Wire” (and also, secretly, “Den of Thieves”). I’d bet that Terrell Owens will go harder than you’d expect a 51-year-old to, and WNBA stars Kayla Thornton and Allisha Gray will outclass the rest of the competitors by a factor of 10, and that after the buzzer sounds, I am able to remember a 14th name from this list.
Castrol Rising Stars: 9 p.m. ET Friday (TNT)
For the fourth straight year, the rebooted rookie-sophomore challenge will feature four seven-player teams competing in a three-game Friday night mini-tournament. In keeping with the weekend’s overall “Bay Area legends” theme, three of the four teams will be coached by Warriors greats Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin — better known by fans who … well, let’s say “Fans Who Might Recognize at Most 59% of the Celebrity Game Rosters,” as Run-TMC.
The fourth — a collection of G Leaguers (and, um, Houston’s Reed Sheppard and Golden State’s Pat Spencer, who have played a combined five games in the G League this season and a combined 61 games with their NBA clubs) — will be coached by Jeremy Lin, who hits the trifecta as a then-called-the-D-League success story, a California native and a multi-time former Warrior. Team C (Mullin’s squad) plays Team T (Hardaway’s); Team M (Richmond’s) plays Team G League; the two winners square off for the title.
In each of the first two games, the first team to 40 points wins. In the championship game, though, it’s first to 25, because, y’know, let’s keep this thing moving.
Team M got the first pick in the Rising Stars draft, and Richmond selected spring-heeled athletic marvel Amen Thompson. As someone who recently did a whole episode of The Big Number with Tom Haberstroh on how dope Amen is …
… I’m into that decision. (I also like that Amen’s twin brother, Pistons wing Ausar Thompson, is on Team M. Let’s see some twin powers activate!)
Injuries to the likes of Jared McCain, Brandon Miller, Dereck Lively II, Scoot Henderson and Cason Wallace have taken some of the more exciting prospects in the pool off the board. On top of that, the removal of second-year thunderbolt Victor Wembanyama from consideration now that he’s a full-fledged All-Star excises the biggest literal and figurative difference-maker from the proceedings. There’s still some fun talent to check out, though.
In addition to the Thompson twins, Team M has Trail Blazers hustle menace Toumani Camara, Bulls high-flyer Matas Buzelis (who we’ll also see in Saturday’s dunk contest), Nuggets long-range bomber Julian Strawther, and Bilal Coulibaly and Bub Carrington, a.k.a. the best reasons to watch the Wizards. Team C features Memphis tandem Zach Edey and Jaylen Wells — the only starters on a playoff team to feature in the proceedings — as well as super-athletic guards Stephon Castle and Keyonte George, plus Dalton Knecht, who’s been having a hell of a week and who, as of press time, is still a Laker.
Team T feels a little light on sizzle — unless Gradey Dick decides to bust out the sequins again, that is — but maybe French countrymen and top-two draft picks Zaccharie Risacher and Alex Sarr play well enough together that we start salivating over the prospect of seeing them alongside Wemby in L.A. in 2028. And maybe some of Lin’s G Leaguers — headlined by Spencer, who hung 51 for Santa Cruz earlier this season, and Sheppard, who put up 49 for Rio Grande Valley last month — offer proof that they’re ready to step up in weight class. And with the winning team getting a chance to do just that in Sunday’s main event, you’d figure there’ll be plenty of motivation to seize the showcase in hopes of using it as a stepping stone to bigger, brighter and better things ahead.
The Skills Challenge has undergone a slight tweak, too — from three teams of three players each to four two-player squads — but it’s still, at base, about finding out who is the best at throwing passes through big hoops, dribbling around obstacles and making uncontested shots while lots of people stare at you. Which means it’s still pretty weird!
This year, we’ve got the hometown Team Warriors (Draymond Green and Moses Moody) against Team Cavs (proper All-Stars Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley), Team Spurs (Wembanyama and Chris Paul) and Team Rooks (the aforementioned French connection of Risacher and Sarr). Both members of each team will have to complete three bounce passes through a moving target, dribble down the court, make a chest pass through a moving target, make a straight-on 3-pointer, an elbow J and a corner 3, and then run to midcourt and try to throw a long outlet pass through, you guessed it, a moving target.
The teams with the two fastest times advance to the final round; the team with the fastest time in that round wins. Handicapping something like this feels like a cry for help, but I will say that if we’re talking about a competition that includes making an elbow jumper, I like Chris Paul’s team’s chances. (Also, I wouldn’t put it past him to sabotage the other teams. “Dirtiest players in the game” don’t change their spots.)
The most important thing? That we don’t find ourselves in a situation that requires “instant replay [to] be utilized for clarification of rules compliance” at “the referee’s discretion.” The last thing we need during the Skills Challenge is a friggin’ trip to Secaucus.
Yeah, probably. Alas!
Maybe! That song friggin’ knocks.
In what has, in recent years, become the most star-driven event of the weekend, five 2025 All-Stars (Jalen Brunson, Cade Cunningham, Darius Garland, Tyler Herro, Damian Lillard), one should-have-been 2025 All-Star in my book (Norman Powell), one former 3-Point Contest winner (Buddy Hield) and one Cam Johnson (Cam Johnson) will take — and, ideally, make — as many triples as they can in 70 seconds.
Unchecked offensive inflation has come to the 3-Point Contest: first, through the addition of a money ball worth two points to each rack; then, through the addition of a rack comprised entirely of money balls; and last season, with the introduction of two “Starry” balls, placed on pedestals approximately 30 feet from the rim, that are worth three points apiece. How will fans of the future be able to contextualize the differing scores across generations? Has the analytics movement gone too far? How will I explain this to my children? The answers to these and many other questions remain elusive.
The biggest question, though, is whether Lillard — Oakland’s own, a (say it with me) Bay Area legend, in the midst of his best 3-point shooting season (38.2% on 9.1 attempts per game) in five years — can replicate the success he found in the tournament in 2023 …
… and 2024 …
… thus joining Larry Bird and Craig Hodges as the third player in the competition’s 39-year history to win three in a row.
He’ll face some stiff competition. Herro and Garland both rank in the top 10 in 3-pointers made. Garland, Powell and Johnson are all shooting well above 40% from deep, while Brunson’s just below at 39.7%. While Hield’s having a down year from deep at just 36.7%, we know he can get scorching hot in a hurry. And Cade … well, Cade’s having an awesome season, and it’s cool that he’s here!
Will Dame etch his name into 3-Point Contest history? Has he worked out a deal with Pat Riley to be able to use the copyrighted term for three consecutive wins without paying through the nose for it (a term I am not using because I have brokered no such deal)? Will Stephen Curry perform a surprise run-in like Stone Cold Steve Austin, hit Buddy over the head with a steel chair, steal his spot and shoot for glory as the Chase Center crowd goes ballistic? We’ll all find out the answers soon enough.
While I do firmly believe that dunk contests can really only ever be kind of bad, because dunking, like pizza, is at worst always at least pretty good … it’s difficult to look at a field featuring four players with whom few casual fans are likely to be even glancingly familiar and think, “People are going to get as amped over this as they did for some of the iconic contests of yesteryear.”
That’s not exactly fair to someone like Mac McClung, whose gravest sin is not being quite good enough as an all-around player to make the leap from the G League to the big show, and who has won the last two Dunk Contests by performing some truly insane and complex aerial artistry:
Nor is it fair to the three youngsters trying to take McClung’s crown: lottery picks Stephon Castle of the San Antonio Spurs and Matas Buzelis of the Chicago Bulls, and sophomore defensive troublemaker Andre Jackson Jr. All three are hella athletic (Bay term), with more than enough hops to make jaws drop:
But the concept of fairness is fighting an uphill battle against the staggering weight of memories like MJ vs. ’Nique or Vince in 2000, and against the mind’s-eye dreamcasting of Yeah, But What If [INSERT FAMOUS AWESOME DUNKER HERE] Did It? — a cottage industry that might not have started with LeBron James, but certainly reached its highest ebb and loudest volume with him — in an era in which the risk/reward calculus prompts eye-popping dunkers and real-deal All-Stars like Zion Williamson, Ja Morant and Anthony Edwards to consistently decline invitations to compete. (Which, honestly, is why I kind of thought Jaylen Brown would wind up winning last year’s judging, even if someone else had objectively better dunks, in hopes of reversing the “abandonment” of the event.) What we’re actually seeing can rarely hold a candle to the version we’ve imagined for ourselves, no matter how impressive it is.
Rarely, but not never. There hadn’t been a Dunk Contest in three years before Vince became immortal in 2000. From there, a handful of fallow years … and then pint-sized Nate Robinson, planet-sized Dwight Howard and central-casting star Blake Griffin revitalized it. Another half-decade or so of low ebb before All-Star Weekend 2015 in Brooklyn introduced the entire world to a lanky 19-year-old miracle named Zach LaVine; one year later, LaVine and a similarly not-all-that-well-known forward named Aaron Gordon authored a performance — and, more importantly, a competition — for the ages.
It’s like my man Anton Ego said: Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. I don’t know if McClung can top himself — he’s already said that this will be his last competition because “you know, you run out of dunks” — and I don’t know if Castle, Buzelis or Jackson has magic running between their minds and high-tops. But in dunk contests, as in difficult times, hope dies last. As long as they keep having them, we’ll keep showing up, hoping that the next takeoff is the one that returns us to the joys of competitions past.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, “The 7-foot-4 guy everyone calls a friggin’ alien.”
In the project of trying to pull off something ludicrous in the All-Star Game, Victor Wembanyama has an ace up his sleeve. You guys: It turns out that — c’mere, bring it in, huddle up, be cool, keep this under your hat — this guy is actually planning to … try.
“If it turns out like every other recent game, slow and just playing around, I hope I can bring that contrast of a single guy who goes crazy, dives on the ball, hustles every play,” Wembanyama recently told reporters. “I’m definitely going to try to bring that energy.”
What a concept!
He’s the greatest player in the world, but Nikola Jokić turned a breakaway dunk into a finger roll and tried to call a travel on himself last year. Let’s just say that I don’t think he’s going to be bending over backward to give us death-defying feats of derring-do.
It was abundantly clear well before the NBA announced the official names of the teams that Chuck, Shaq and Kenny “spontaneously drafted” that there’d been a specific calculation made as to how to structure this new tournament.
Pit the old guard that has carried the league for the past two decades against the approaching-their-prime collective trying to supplant it and the tidal wave of overseas talent that has increasingly broadened the parameters of the sport’s superstar class over the past decade. Attempt to reintroduce some measure of caring into the proceedings by presenting the possibility that someone you perceive as encroaching on your territory — an aging galaxy who won’t cede the sky unless extinguished; a bunch of kids who haven’t really won squat yet in this league; um, guys literally from somewhere else — might gain bragging rights over you and embarrass you. All while Kevin Hart makes jokes about it, in the course of promoting one of the six projects he’s currently got in development.
Whether that’s enough to motivate any of the participants to actually kick things into high gear remains to be seen. The general conceit, though, offers some intrigue: We spent the summer watching LeBron, Steph and KD prove they could still lord it over the world’s best with Team USA, but they needed the help of younger stars like Edwards and Devin Booker to do it, and close shaves against Jokić’s Serbia and Wembanyama’s France revealed just how much the gap has narrowed.
Divide ’em all up, throw a few hundred racks in the middle and see what develops. Maybe we enter the stretch run once again awestruck by what the old heads can do, all the more excited to watch LeBron and Steph chase the postseason on their newly bolstered squads (and all the more curious about what the future might hold for Durant). Maybe we come away feeling like we’d just seen an unofficial passing of the torch. And maybe the proceedings are spicy enough to move us one step closer to another star-suggested format change.
“It just makes me think if there was a game of the World vs. USA, that would be interesting,” Wembanyama recently told reporters. “That would be even better.”
