The NBA has spent a lot of energy in recent years trying to get some juice back into All-Star Weekend. They have tinkered with the format of just about every competition they have over the weekend to try and make it a bigger deal.
This year, the big change is to the All-Star Game itself, which will feature a mini-tournament between three teams of 8 All-Stars and the winning team from the Rising Stars competition. The new format mimics what they’ve done with the Rising Stars game, which has been an improvement if for no other reason than it keeps things moving. When it comes to the Saturday Night competitions, the most important thing is to have the biggest names participating.
That’s not a difficult thing to do with the Three-Point Shootout, as they regularly get stars to shoot, but the Skills Challenge and Dunk Contest have not been particularly popular among All-Star talent in recent years. The Dunk Contest’s issue is the risk-reward balance for stars is just not right, so you rarely get the biggest names participating. The league recently turned the Skills Challenge into a team competition in an effort to get bigger names involved — they got Giannis to participate alongside his brothers — and tried a similar approach this year to get LeBron participating in Saturday night festivities for the first time in two decades.
According to Chris Haynes, the league invited LeBron and Bronny James to be part of a Skills Challenge team, but they declined the invitation. Being the first father and son to participate in the Skills Challenge isn’t exactly the kind of accolade that’s getting LeBron all that excited and I think they realize there’s not a ton of upside to participating, while there’s a very good chance to become memes if things go wrong. I will give the NBA credit for recognizing this as the rare chance to get LeBron doing something on Saturday night, but unfortunately for them, the James family will not be one of the Skills Challenge teams.
