NBA All-Star Saturday Night consisted of three components: the KIA Skills Challenge, the Starry 3-Point Contest and the AT&T Slam Dunk Contest.
Four teams of two participated in the skills challenge. The teams were Chris Paul and Victor Wembanyama, Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley, Zaccharie Risacher and Alex Sarr, and finally Draymond Green and Moses Moody.
The team to start the challenge was Paul and Wembanyama. The challenge consisted of making passes, attempting threes and jumpers, and finishing with a layup.
Paul and Wembanyama took advantage of not needing to make any of the jump shots to move on in the challenge. They lightly tossed the three basketballs in front of them for each type of jumper, not making an actual attempt. They then moved on to the next portion of the competition.
While they were disqualified by the lack of shot attempts, this displayed one of the biggest problems with this challenge: it did not depend on making an actual jump shot.
If the players missed all three attempts at the shooting spot, they moved on in the challenge anyway. The shooting talent these players have did not matter a significant amount, although they will save time if they make the first jumper. Still, it would be more exciting to watch if there was more value to making these shots.
It would likely motivate the players even more in the challenge, as that was something they struggled with a bit. In recent years, players can be seen going through the challenges at a slower pace and making simple errors in it.
Also, the challenge remained the same for each round. There were no adjustments that made the challenge more difficult for the championship round. This made it boring, as fans watched the same shots and passes throughout the entire challenge.
After this skills challenge came the 3-point contest. A score of 20 was met or exceeded only four out of the 11 times that a player shot.
It featured many talented shooters such as Buddy Hield, Tyler Herro, Jalen Brunson, Damian Lillard, and Darius Garland. However, a lot of these guys struggled shooting the three ball; no performance was out-standing or impressive.
Herro went on to win the contest, which is exciting for the league, since it needs these younger guys to step up and exert their dominance with its most popular players getting older.
Ultimately, it would have been better to have seen a stronger shooting – and a more competitive – performance.
The last event of the night was the slam dunk contest that Mac McClung saved again. He earned 50s on all of his dunks and won the contest for the third time straight. He dunked over a car, dunked two basketballs at once, and jumped over the 6 ’11 Mobley who stood on a platform.
In that dunk, he managed to tap the basketball on the rim before dunking it.
While the other contestants had some good dunks, this contest was missing the best dunkers in the league. McClung’s performance, though, might have motivated them to return to the contest.
Ja Morant, arguably the best dunker in the game right now, posted these tweets on his X account:
Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon famously battled against each other in the 2016 dunk contest. LaVine replied by saying “Thinking I might have too again…’’
If these talented dunkers and star players return to the dunk contest, the 3-point contest has a better and more competitive performance and the league makes the needed adjustments to the skills competition, they should have a very successful Saturday night next year.
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