The Celebrity Game shows the NBA’s broad appeal

A line you often hear during the NBA Celebrity Game is that everyone wants to be a basketball player. This is an extension of the old rap cliche that every rapper wants to be a baller and every baller wants to be a rapper.

The original purpose of that cliche was to underline the similar environments that forged most rappers and basketball players. They had the same backgrounds and the same dreams of escaping, using two of the few options that were available to them: music and basketball. A third option was to sell drugs.

The idea that rappers want to be ballers is still true. Quavo of Migos was one of the participants in the celebrity game and Quavo used to play basketball as a kid.

But the idea that everyone wants to be a basketball player is even more true now than just rappers. The names on the court with Quavo included Terence Crawford, Jerry Ferrara, Sterling Brim, Caleb McLaughlin, Kris Wu, Drew Scott, Anthony Anderson, Miles Brown, Win Butler, Andre De Grasse, Jamie Foxx, Bubba Watson, Justin Bieber, Dascha Polanco, and Michael B. Jordan.

More than the fame (or non-fame) of the names is the diversity of the group. Actors, entertainers, hip-hop artists, other musicians, athletes in other sports, all from different racial and cultural backgrounds. It shows the NBA’s greatest strength as a product compared to other American sports: It appeals to everyone. Or, rather, it has no problems actively appealing to everyone.

The Celebrity Game, which started in 2003, has always underscored that vast range of appeal. The NBA just needed to find a way to include all of those various people into the larger conversation of the league. Fifteen years later, that’s clearly happened.

The power of the current NBA is that the league knows there’s enough space for everyone. Social media has helped in turning the league into a permanent global conversation, but the league has a unashamed realness and celebration of its people that others don’t. A bland product can appeal to a general audience, but it’s not fun. An authentic one that celebrates all, no matter who they are, is more engaging.

With that, the NBA can be more of a brand than merely a sport. It’s basketball, but it’s also a show, one full of unique characters that consumers of all walks of lives can understand. You can have many different heroes and villains, all intertwining in narratives that can also stand on their own. You let Russell Westbrook be Russell Westbrook, even if he’s vastly different than as Stephen Curry, LeBron James, or Kyrie Irving. You can have Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich expressing themselves about basketball and the greater world in which the league exists.

But it goes beyond the players. There is a celebration of the different types of fans as well. As the celebrity game was going on, Miles Brown, the 12-year-old Blackish actor, was pulled aside from the bench to the commentary table so he could gush about meeting LeBron. After the first quarter, Michael B. Jordan was interviewed not just as part of his current Black Panther press tour, but also to discuss his namesake, his Finals prediction, and so on. This was after Celebrity Game legend Kevin Hart clowned Nick Cannon’s basketball skills on the big screen.

The league has sported Black History Month shirts all month, and even if the message is mundane, the acknowledgement of such a historic time is anything but. Sure, all that special attire for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Noche Latina, Hispanic Heritage Month, Chinese New Year, Bollywood Night, Asian Night, and the rest are designed to sell inventory to increase the reach of the teams and league, but they also signal that the NBA actively wants those different consumers.

The Celebrity Game is boring in the same way that watching a bunch of people you don’t know and aren’t good at basketball generally is. Still, it’s heartening to see a mix of people from different backgrounds together, all enjoying the chance to pretend to be their basketball idols. Yes, even when they’re idols and entertainers themselves.

If NBA All-Star Weekend is viewed through the lens of competition, it’s far from the best thing the NBA does. The ongoing conversation about how hard players try in the All-Star Game itself is proof of that.

But if the weekend is instead viewed as evidence of the culture of basketball and what it means to people, even the Celebrity Game has a lot of gravity.