It doesn’t happen very often, so we’re a little surprised the Three-Point Shootout was much more entertaining than the Dunk Contest. But we’ll start with the dunkers since we know everyone will want to talk about them anyways. Jeremy Evans won it, beating out a group of guys who hired drunk entertainers (Chase Budinger) to throw them lobs, honored Larry Bird in a dunk contest (Paul George) and missed the same dunk for two minutes straight (Nate Robi…. aw, we mean Derrick Williams). Evans was okay. We guess. He probably won the vote because Utah fans have nothing better to do. The double dunk was cool. But honoring Karl Malone wasn’t all that great. When he pulled out the No. 32 jersey, we were like “Okay, now throw that on, bring out Greg Miller and dunk on him.” THAT would’ve been dope (although probably half the arena wouldn’t get it). But the thing we’re most pissed about? The best dunk of the whole night was one we didn’t even see. George’s reverse 360 windmill – the same one Vince Carter led off the 2000 Dunk Contest with – was done without the lights on. As our man Trey Kerby tweeted, “Owls and bats loved that dunk.” We couldn’t have put it any better … As for the highlight of the night, Kevin Love showed it doesn’t matter how big you are or what position you play, shooting can be fun for everyone, proving you don’t need to wear hipster glasses to hit from long range. He won the Three-Point Shootout over the other Kevin, Mr. Durant. Durant blew it basically, missing a bunch of shots right at the end when he had a chance to reach out and grab the trophy … The best part of the contest was there wasn’t one bad guy or one Reggie Evans-performance out there. No one reminded us of when MJ went out and dropped a cool five in this event. For the most part, everyone was money and letting it flow. Even old man Craig Hodges put in work … We joked on Twitter that Ryan Anderson didn’t really lose. He actually just had to leave. Stan Van Gundy wanted him to run through some rebounding drills instead … … Keep reading to hear what happened when Kobe finally showed up to field media questions …
Tony Parker took home the Skills Challenge by having better “timing” than anyone else. None of his scores were all that crazy. He just picked the right times to have them. We really expected Deron Williams to win this thing because he came out fired up, and has a history of dominating point guards matchups (and this event). It’s too bad he missed four straight Js on his final round. We figured he’d gotten all the bricks out of his system with his 41 percent shooting on the season … Team New York won the Haier Shooting Stars contest, and it was only cool because Allan Houston ended it with a shot from midcourt. We can picture New York fans dancing in the streets right now … When you’re a credentialed media member, they’re always passing out statistical updates. But that’s considering we’re always at games. They actually had people passing out papers last night with stuff like which shots guys made and which passes they screwed up in the obstacle course … On our live blog last night (which we hope you were hitting up, and we hope you come back tonight too), we joked about the ridiculous outfits LeBron and Wade were wearing and how everyone in the NBA is slowing turning into a hipster. Well check out this tweet from Jarrett Jack: “All star weekend is like the first day of school u wear ur best stuff obviously kyrie irving,lebron,d wade aint get the memo.” … Earlier in the day, we hit up the All-Star practice, and if you thought a DMX concert in 2000 was crazy, you should’ve been here in Orlando with us. People were flipping out. It was impossible to get to pretty much everyone. Getting close to LeBron was like trying to touch Obama, and even Joe Johnson – who’s hurt and only showed up because Stern probably threatened to “basketball reason” his contract if he didn’t – had a crowd around him. Kobe finally showed up, and stayed a few minutes later to answer questions. He nearly caused a riot. We think every country/continent in the world had representation there to try to talk to him, possibly even Antarctica … Derrick Rose told us this: “I didn’t really start watching the Olympics until the Redeem Team.” What? … As for the “practice” it consisted of the guys playing little shooting games, and then trying to stroke it from midcourt (Dwight Howard thought he’d be cool and shoot them backwards.). Carmelo Anthony made five of his first six shots from half-court as every Knick fan in the building screamed at him to shoot more of those in games … And if you want to know how big “Linsanity” has become, Stern had a press conference last night in the same room Lin had one in on Friday night… and it was like comparing a cool kid’s party with a nerd’s party. We couldn’t believe it. Stern was only talking about really important stuff, things like “the state of the NBA” and “basketball as a whole.” Lin’s Q&A started off with someone asking him about his freakin’ 2K12 rating … We’re out like blindfolded dunks.
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