NBA All-Star Game
January 29th, 2009I’m a huge basketball fan as some of you may know. I just saw the list of NBA All-Star reserves that were just announced today… and once again, its a total joke. SHAQ is an All-Star??? Does that guy even play half the season anymore? Good God. There’s a pretty good chance I won’t watch any of the festivities this year… ever since JRich won back to back dunk contests the entire freaking weekend has been boring. So I’ve been thinking about some ways to spice it up. Here they are:
• Turn the lame dunk contest into a Posterization Dunk Contest. Four dunkers go head-to-head with four shot blockers tourney-style, winner gets $1 mil, or enough to actually entice good players to participate. Each dunker gets three tries to ram it on someone’s head, or 45 seconds. Think of the possibilities- you could have Lebron vs. Dwight Howard, Nate Robinson vs. Yao, Amare vs. his own teammate Shaq, Vince Carter vs. that French guy, etc. You could also throw in some cash for the guy who blocks every dunk attempt. This would be so awesome, just for the fact that you’d either see someone get teabagged or get taken off the court on a stetcher. It’s a win-win.
• 3 Point Shooting Contest for guys who only shoot 3’s. Notice how every year the NBA puts dudes like Gilbert Arenas, Dirk, Ray Allen, and Steve Nash in the 3 point contest, even though these guys almost never lead the league in 3 point percentage and look like they’re hung over during the contest? I’ve also wondered why no one has ever hit a perfect score. Granted its pretty damn tough, but why hasn’t anyone ever hit 28 or 29? From what I remember the best score was Jason Kapono with 25. You always hear about scrubs like Rashad McCants who once hit like 70 out of 75 in practice, or Wally Szerbiak hitting like 86 out of 100 as a shooting drill. So here’s what I would do: only put spot-up 3 point shooters in and give them like 2 minutes to finish 5 racks. Guys like Anthony Morrow, Jason Kapono, JJ Redick, Matt Bonner, etc. WInner gets $500k. Anyone who hits a perfect score of 30 gets an extra $500k. The only problem with this is no one would probably watch it, because no one knows who the guys I just mentioned are.
• Instead of the stupid NBA Skills Contest, change it to a Crossover Contest. Guys like AI, Baron, Derrick Rose, etc. could participate. Take a bunch of D-League point guards and put them in 1-on-1 against an NBA PG. Each NBA PG has 30 seconds to shake their defender and get to the rim. Quickest player to the rim wins, or first to make his defender fall on his ass. A prize goes to the D-leaguer who makes a steal or stops the NBA player from scoring.
• Change the ridiculous fan voting. One of these days someone like Rafer Alston or Shane Battier is going to make it into the All-Star game starting lineup, just because everyone in China votes for whoever Yao plays with. Did you know that Jamal Crawford got more votes than Brandon Roy this year? It’s such a joke. I would change it so that the fans only get to vote in 2 players or something, regardless of position. The rest of the teams get voted in by coaches and players, each player or coach can vote for one other player but no one on his own team. Then raise the stakes by making it so that the conference winner gets home court advantage in the Finals, sort of like what baseball does. This way everyone in the All-Star game would take it seriously and actually play for real.
There’s about a zero chance that any of this would happen, but it’s fun to dream, right?