Steph Curry and Shaq’s OG’s take home All-Star win

In a very strange telecast that featured competitive basketball, endless intermissions, and Mr. Beast, Curry and his veterans pals won it all

In an All-Star Game that featured compelling basketball and baffling scheduling decisions, Team Shaq defeated Team Chuck in the final behind an MVP performance from Steph Curry.

Curry scored 12 points in the final game as Shaq’s OGs won, 41-25. Curry led the OGs with four rebounds and added an assist, plus a series of classic Curry big game moments: Turnaround threes, long-distance shots, no-look passes fired directly out of bounds.

It’s Curry second All-Star MVP award, awarded due to his 20 combined points in dispatching Team Candace (a bunch of rookies and sophomores that included Golden State Warriors center Trayce Jackson-Davis and Team Chuck (mostly international players plus Trae Young and Donovan Mitchell). Poor Victor Wembanyama just can’t get past Curry in a big game.

But this All-Star Game was very strange. The new format pitted three eight-player teams of All-Stars against one another in a round robin tournament, with the fourth team being the team who advanced out of the Rising Stars round robin tournament. Each game was played to a final score of 40 points, not based on time.

The teams were drafted by “Inside The NBA” personalities Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kenny Smith, and ended up being teams of young All-Stars (Kenny), international players (Chuck), and future Hall of Famers + Boston Celtics (Shaq). This was due to the analyst’s own ideas and personal quirks or a conspiracy by Adam Silver to unofficially create nationalistic rivalries.

Did this work to make the game more competitive? Yes, to a degree. Wembanyama was blocking shots, players were getting back on defense, and while Team Shaq kept going for a long-range kill shot to dispatch Team Candace, they ultimately won by getting a lot of layups and dunks. This was the kind of intensity Silver and the NBA wanted!

Only the result was that the telecast had the least amount of basketball in All-Star Game history. Player introductions and on-court emcee Kevin Hart riffing with Ernie Johnson made the game start 15 minutes late. Despite being played to 40 points, each game had at least two timeouts, replete with extended commercials. Then there were long intermissions between games, so the players could warm up and Kevin Hart could tell a national TV audience that Shaq was “dressed like a porn director.” Enjoy the game, kids!

During one break, Mr. Beast had a fan try to make one long-range shot before Damian Lillard could sink three of them, to win $100K. The fan eventually did it, but the game took forever. Then during the final, with Team Shaq up 11-1, they took an extended break for a tribute to TNT’s “Inside The NBA,” where Hart gave out fishing gear to the crew in honor of this being the final NBA All-Star Game to be broadcast on TNT.

Only…why did this happen in the middle of the final game? Why wasn’t it before the game, or at one of the countless intermissions? And why was it happening at all, given that Ernie, Chuck, Shaq, and Kenny are still doing the show next season, in the same studio, just for ESPN instead? The tribute felt like they were retiring, not just getting licensed to a different cable network.

Afterward, the final got far less serious, full of half-court shots, fancy dribbling, and zero defense, maybe because the players were rightly worried about getting injured after a third extended break. Adam Silver seemingly wanted a more serious game, then turned everything else about the telecast into a carnival.

Other notes:

• LeBron James and Anthony Edwards both scratched at the last moment. James announced he was sitting out a few hours before the game, while no one on the broadcast seemed to know that Edwards was out with an injury until his Team Kenny teammates had already lost to Team Chuck.
• The pre-game introductions ran long, but the pre-game music was on point, with Raphael Saadiq leading a medley of Bay Area classic songs, from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to Souls Of Mischief’s “93 ‘Til Infinity.”
• The “Pass The Mic” performance after the second game was also excellent, featuring Warriors superfan E-40, Too Short self-bleeping his “favorite word” by literally blowing a whistle, Saweetie, and the ageless En Vogue.
• Oakland’s Lillard lost in the first round of the Three-Point Contest, lost in front of Mr. Beast, and then played just two minutes in the final. He did sink three three-pointers in the win over Team Candace, including the game-winner.

• It was ironic that Barkley, who repeatedly insisted that a jump-shooting team couldn’t win a title, lost because his hand-picked team went 2-for-16 from distance in the final, while Team Shaq made 9 three-pointers in 17 attempts.
• Hart’s energy was so unpleasant all evening that it wouldn’t be a surprise if he agreed to a buyout with TNT in order to sign with the Phoenix Suns.
• Kevin Durant was unsurprisingly showered in cheers all game long from the Chase Center crowd. He took a backseat to Curry and Jayson Tatum (15 points) in the final, but delivered some nice passes and played defense as much as anyone did in the weirdly-truncated last game.
• The least-used All-Star was Alperen Sengun of the Houston Rockets, who played only four minutes in his first game and only one minute in the final. It wasn’t anything personal — he was on a team with three other centers in Wembanyama, Nikola Jokic, and Karl-Anthony Towns.
• Team Chuck crushed Team Kenny on the boards in the first game, 14-3. If the NBA repeats this format, they might want to allocate the guards and big men slightly more evenly — Team Kenny had four point guards, two power forwards, and zero centers.
• Inevitably, this year’s game will lead to the NBA changing up the format of the game again, but there’s one easy fix. The NBA has far more teams than it used to, along with larger rosters. Why not add 2-3 All-Stars in each league, reflecting the added depth of talent, which allows them to make four All-Star teams of 7-8 players. Then, they don’t have to have Rising Stars playing in the All-Star Game, something Draymond Green railed against throughout the whole telecast.

• Another fix? Add 10 points to the target score, making it a game to 50. As it is, there simple isn’t enough basketball in the endless telecast. If it’s going to be a three-hour slog, at least the majority of that should be All-Stars playing basketball.
• Shaq made his entrance along with a dancing, AI-powered robot dog, which is not a sentence I thought I would ever type.
• The All-Star Game heads to the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles next year to be hosted by the Los Angeles Clippers and be broadcast on NBC. In other words, get ready for a 30-minute mid-game tribute to John Tesh and “Roundball Rock,” hopefully with Steve Ballmer dancing like an AI robot dog.