All-Star Saturday is a perfect encapsulation of the NBA’s personality. There’s an appreciation for the league’s history and an embrace of its present. The brightest stars come out, dressed to the nines while they’re sitting on the sidelines, delivering the most outrageous reactions to the feats on the basketball court. The night is an opportunity to celebrate the silliest parts of the NBA, a microcosm of a league that simply enjoys having fun.
Over the past decade, the Skills Challenge has become a fixture of All-Star Saturday. Despite its lower profile compared to the Slam Dunk Contest or the Three-Point Shootout, it has also earned a special place in All-Star lore, and its many iterations have reflected the evolution of the NBA point guard.
When the Skills Challenge debuted in 2003, it was a good way to involve players who weren’t high-flyers or shooters. This was a contest for pure point guards, and the course reflected that. There were agility drills to test a player’s handle, three passing stations — one chest pass, one bounce pass, and one outlet pass — as well as a free-throw line jumper and two layups.
Back in 2004, the prototypical point guard was pass-first. He directed an offense, but didn’t generate much scoring for himself. As a result, the bulk of the skills involved passes or getting the ball up the court, and the resulting field was a collection of point guards who fit that mold, including Jason Kidd (the event’s first champion), Tony Parker, and Gary Payton.
Steve Nash entered the Skills Challenge in 2005, and he represented a new archetype among point guards. Nash was absolutely pass-first, potentially to a fault if you ask Mike D’Antoni, but in his first season in Phoenix, he took on a greater scoring load than previously expected from the lead guard en route to two straight MVP awards. Nash was a point guard who could command a defense’s attention at all times, as his shooting was on par with his stellar passing ability.
Nash was the beginning of a generation of point guards weren’t limited by the historical constraints of the role. He was followed by players like Deron Williams and Chris Paul, both multiple-time participants in the event: dominant passers who elevated their position by being All-Star level scorers. The jumper, once the bugaboo of many a Skills Challenge entrant (Kidd and Parker had big trouble with this portion), became one of the easier elements in the course.
At this moment in Skills Challenge history, non-traditional primary ball-handlers like Dwyane Wade or LeBron James also started to enter the contest. The challenge was no longer just the domain of point guards, as exemplified by Wade winning the event in back-to-back years (2006-07); players who nominally played different positions had the same abilities as point guards on the basketball court. It was commonplace to hear James referred to as a 6’9 point guard.
Point guards took the league by storm in the 2010s. Every MVP in this decade, except for Kevin Durant, has been his team’s primary ball-handler and leading scorer. It became the deepest position in the NBA, and the Skills Challenge expanded to eight participants in 2014 to accommodate that. More importantly, the format changed.
Ten years before, point guards were known primarily for their passing, but the league was trending towards guards who could score, and specifically, who could shoot. In response to that, the Skills Challenge eliminated two of its more difficult elements in 2014, the bounce pass and the outlet pass. In 2015, the event went full pace-and-space. Now, participants have to compete against one another by covering the full length of the floor three times, and they have to sink a three-pointer to win.
Teams currently build their rosters around point guards who can shoot. Whereas ball-handling and shot creation can be found at a multitude of positions, the most successful offenses are those where the smallest players can let it fly from deep, making shooting arguably the most important skill for a point guard in the modern NBA.
The NBA was a different league stylistically when the Skills Challenge was introduced 16 years ago. Point guards were lauded for their skill, while players at other positions were noted for their athleticism. Now those elements intermingle up and down the roster; point guards need speed to run the floor, and wings and bigs have the ball handling to run an offense. Big men, who were once excluded from the Skills Challenge altogether, made up half of the field starting in 2016.
The definition of “skill” has changed as the league innovates its style of play. Offense is generated from every spot on the floor. Look at the lineup of this year’s Skills Challenge participants: There are pure point guards, bigs, wings, and a player who defies classification in Luka Doncic. Despite their size, all of them have similar talents to the event’s original participants in 2003.
The Skills Challenge may only be an appetizer for the rest of All-Star Saturday, but it has become an interesting way to examine the evolution of the game. What was once a playground for the NBA’s point guards has become an expression of a position-less league.
