5 easy ways to make the NBA All-Star Game less boring

Some of us like the NBA All-Star Game. It’s essentially a 48-minute dunk contest interspersed with a tremendous number of threes, some fun passes, and dribble moves. It’s a playground game among the very best players in the world. Just because it’s not terribly competitive and has no wider meaning in the sport is irrelevant. Some things can be fun just to be fun.

But NBA commissioner Adam Silver and players’ union president Chris Paul both think the All-Star Game needs to be more competitive. Silver floated rules reminiscent of MTV’s old Rock N’ Jock celebrity games like 10-point shots. (For the love of the Basketball Gods: We do not need to replace a barrage of bricked three-pointers with a barrage of bricked half-court shots.)

Here are some better ideas to infuse the All-Star Game with some intrigue without losing its essential spirit of irrelevant fun.

No one should play more than 20 minutes in the All-Star Game. These players all play too much in the regular season anyway: You might get more effort if they are only getting 15 minutes of action in the middle of their week off. This would preclude efforts like Anthony Davis’ record-breaking performance in 2017, but we’ll survive.

You can reduce everyone’s minutes by expanding the rosters to 15 per team — the same as it is for normal NBA squads — and shrinking the game. We don’t need 48 minutes. Try out 40-minute games with 10-minute quarters. This would also prevent the video-game final scores that rub some folks the wrong way.

Now instead of splitting 240 minutes between 12 players (an average of 20 each), coaches will divvy up 200 minutes between 15 players (about 13 apiece on average).

Speaking of coaches ...

Coaching the All-Star Game is definitely a serious honor for the league’s sideline bosses. You could tell how much Brad Stevens loved being able to hang out with LeBron during All-Star practice, and Steve Kerr has loads of fun with the whole weekend.

But can we dismiss the idea of player-coaches out of hand? Let each team elect one of its own to be a co-coach at the beginning of the weekend — that player can join the properly selected head coach in decision-making. Part of their role could be in selecting who starts the game (we’ll get to that in a moment). The real head coach and player-coach could trade off drills in practice — you know you want to see Chris Paul make the West team run shuttles — and could collaborate on drawing up plays.

This is also a sneaky way to reduce the minutes of one veteran on each team. Coaching is exhausting!

This can be the job of the player-coach. Currently, the fans, players, and media vote on the starters for the game. Instead, have that collection of voters select only five All-Stars per conference, not the starters. After coaches add their picks and the commissioner selects any injury replacements, you have 15 players per conference.

Let the two player-coaches go to center court after the anthems, microphones in hand. They take turns hyping up and announcing their starting five right there in public. Think of the cheers and boos from the crowd! Think of the player-coach trying to properly pronounce Giannis Antetokounmpo’s last name! Think of the content internet sports writers could curate!

We don’t need to have coaches pick the players to fill the new All-Star slots. Dedicate one from each conference to the game’s rising stars.

More specifically, players from the Rising Stars Challenge. That game for rookies and sophomores pits American-born players against internationals. Take two of the best performers from the Friday night Rising Stars Challenge and add them to the appropriate All-Star team. That will juice up the competition in the Challenge a bit.

And how fun would it have been to see Jamal Murray and Frank Kaminsky each get a cup of coffee in Sunday’s main event?

The real nut to crack here is how to make the players care about the final score a little more. Right now, the players who participate care about making highlights and pleasing fans, which is awesome. (They also care about not being in an opponent’s highlight.) But there’s no reason to care about the final score.

Making the game mean something in a competitive sense is a bad idea — on no planet should the All-Star Game result determine home-court advantage in the Finals, or something. No. Don’t do that. The idea of financial incentives for the winning team has come up in the past, but these players make so much loot that the prize purse would have to be massive to make the guys play hard defense and run actual sets. That’s a poor use of resources.

But these players all have pet causes. Most of them have their own foundations. Let each team pick a charity they will play for, and raise a huge pile of lucre in the run-up to the game. Dole it out the winning charity. There could be side bets, too: Each individual player has a chosen charity to receive a fat check if they win All-Star MVP. Perhaps raising charity money in the weeks before All-Star could be a competition in itself: The top fundraiser gets to be the player-coach, or the captain, or something.

These stars are proud competitors who aren’t going to risk their bodies or pride in this exhibition for no good reason. But creating a charitable incentive could, along with the other reforms mentioned, ramp up the competition just enough to get us through the All-Star Game without groans.