To paraphrase a Nobel laureate on the perennial crises facing another form of live entertainment, the NBA All-Star Game is an institution that has been dying for 70 years but has yet to succumb. The complaints are persistent, well-documented, and mainly attributed to a single factor: players’ lack of effort. An absence of defensive activity, in particular, is said to make All-Star Games almost unwatchable.
For some players, the lack of effort is not an accident – the game falls in the middle of the NBA’s All-Star Break, a six-day pause in competitive play that serves as the only meaningful time off during the league’s 82-game regular season. Indeed, many of the players not named to All-Star teams use the break to go on holiday. Despite this tendency, however, the league’s leadership regularly alters its All-Star Weekend program in an (often ineffective) effort to encourage competitive play.
In the last decade alone, the NBA has introduced playground-style team selections (in lieu of players being assigned a team based on conference), clock-free Elam endings (too complicated to explain here), and even monetary bonuses, all in an effort to encourage players to take the All-Star Game more seriously. The results have been underwhelmin; even NBA commissioner Adam Silver seemed bored when presenting the winner’s trophy after last year’s game.
Related: Big money, star talent and glam rooms: will Unrivaled transform women’s basketball?
This year, the league is ditching its traditional two-team, single-game All-Star format in favor of a four-team, three-game mini-tournament. Whether this innovation will translate into quality basketball, however, remains to be seen. Given the All-Star Game’s recent history, it seems unlikely.
Further tinkering with the All-Star Game format continues to be limited by multiple factors, including the game’s relative rarity – as an annual event, fans and NBA executives alike must wait 12 months between each iteration, making trial-and-error innovation a time-expensive process. Fortunately, the NBA is no longer the only league experimenting the professional basketball space.
Unrivaled is a professional 3-on-3 women’s basketball league currently in the middle of its first season. With its recognisable coaches and nomadic structure (ie teams are not tied to specific cities), Unrivaled at first appears to be the women’s version of the Big3, the men’s 3-on-3 league founded in 2017 by Ice Cube. There are, however, several critical differences. Unrivaled, for example, features full-court play while the Big3 is a half-court game. The most important distinguishing feature, however, is in the type of players each league attracts – while the Big3’s rosters are filled out mainly by a mix of retired NBA players and younger, not-quite-NBA-level teammates, Unrivaled’s teams entirely consist of active WNBA players.
There are a few notable absences—neither superstar Caitlin Clark nor reigning WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson are playing in this year’s competition. Many of women’s basketball’s other leading names, however, are present: Brittney Griner, Sabrina Ionescu, Aliyah Boston and Breanna Stewart are just the most known among the many other WNBA All-Stars currently playing on Unrivaled squads. Even if Unrivaled’s only contribution to professional basketball was the concept of an off-season 3-on-3 league featuring the world’s best players, it would a worthy addition to the sporting calendar. The league’s greatest innovation, however, is found within one of its side competitions.
In addition to its core 3-on-3 competition, Unrivaled also incorporated a 1-on-1 tournament into its inaugural season and, in doing so, may have introduced a competition format that is exactly what the NBA (and its players) are looking for in an annual event tied to All-Star Weekend. The 1-on-1 tournament, which ended Friday when forward (and Unrivaled cofounder) Napheesa Collier defeated rookie Aaliyah Edwards in the best-of-three finals, offers a level of competition that many fans would love to see in an NBA All-Star setting.
Despite being one of the most common forms of playground basketball, the game’s 1-on-1 variant has never taken off as a spectator sport. Red Bull, the energy drink company, sponsored tournaments a decade ago and NBA Hall of Famer Tracy McGrady’s Ones Basketball League was won by a minor-league men’s basketballer in 2022, but neither featured the world-class talent or high-profile media coverage of the Unrivaled tournament (indeed, in the US the finals of Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament was broadcast in primetime on TNT, a channel associated with professional basketball owing to its decades-long association with the Emmy-winning programme Inside the NBA). Based on the players’ exhausted demeanours, they took the tournament seriously and, with a few tweaks,…
The Guardian
