NBA All-Star weekend is boring because it is built to be boring

Every year the All-Star Weekend comes around, we talk about what we need to do to make the events more exciting. We debate possible ways to up the thrill factor. We discuss which events have merit and which ones are beyond saving. We’ll get into the Dunk Contest vs. Three-Point Contest debate, maybe, if things are particularly slow.

It’s all pretty silly. The competitions of the weekend are boring, and I don’t think any format can really change that. All of the ideas floating around are for naught: The All-Star events will be boring even if you introduce a new scoring system for the Dunk Contest, make the skills contest bigs vs. guards or add even more money balls to the three-point shooting.

These events are boring because what they demonstrate is how hard it is to be a professional athlete and how tedious practice is. These are skills demonstrations, and skills, such as shooting and passing and yes, even dunking, are boring to practice. This is why I believe that the arguments about how boring the whole celebration is are so misguided — no matter what you do, they’re going to be boring.

Watching the Three-Point Contest is like watching players put shots up in practice. There’s a timer, but the principle of shooting a number of shots from different parts of the court is the same as any shootaround; the difference is that now it’s in front of thousands of people. Yet it doesn’t have the same context as an actual game, with real consequences to each missed shot. If you miss in the Three-Point Contest, your team isn’t let down — you just grab another ball.

The Dunk Contest is slightly different. It has been a disappointment for a while now, with the rare good ones, like Aaron Gordon’s spectacular run, standing in stark contrast with every other year that ended in groans and cries that it needs to be fixed.

The problem here is that dunking is hard. What’s asked for in the contest is much different than what the players do in-game. The contest asks for creativity; judges give scores based on difficulty and personal notions of beauty. Players aren’t spending most of their time practicing those types of dunks in the gym; they’re working on their overall skill set. It’s only when they decide to participate in the contest that they start coming up with creative dunks to do.

So these events are either ones that are practice-like in nature and boring, or they’re silly, with little time to prepare. And even the ones that mimic practice can be really hard — look at what Paul George showed us in the Three-Point Contest.

Then if you translate that to the Dunk Contest where players are trying to pull off dunks that they’ve been practicing for only a few weeks, it makes perfect sense that there are always so many missed or incomplete dunks. They’re trying to do things that are inherently hard as hell, with a relatively small window of preparation.

Even the easiest contest of the weekend, the Skills Challenge, shows that a bounce pass is not as routine as it may look in game highlights.

The whole weekend has to be boring because it’s the nature of it. Unless players take it upon themselves to give gravity to the contests, it’s all meaningless and there’s really no incentive for them to take it seriously. To add to that is the fact that athletic life is mostly built on failed attempts, whether it be dunks or shots or bounce passes. Usually we understand and forgive these missed attempts when they happen in a game. But no one really wants to watch the same failures away from the context of real wins and losses.

There are not highlight videos of players missing a bunch of shots or dunks in practice for a reason — it’s not exciting, but it’s more representative of how training and the real game goes than the highlights of someone making 10 shots in a row or doing a reverse-under-the-leg dunk. What we see all too often in All-Star Weekend is the truth.

Maybe there is a magical way to fix the weekend — a format that will make things more competitive, make players more potent from the three and more successful in their ambitious dunks. But as long as there’s nothing to play for and shooting from the three and dunking the ball creatively are still hard, then this unimpressive outcome will be the standard.