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All-Star Saturday Night - Forgettable

I won't beat around the bush here - All-Star Saturday Night was a total snoozer and one that people will easily forget. 

From a one-hour H-O-R-S-E game to a bland dunk contest there was little to talk about after the "festivities" in Dallas.

There's not a lot to talk about after All-Star Saturday night. If you missed it, you didn't miss much. If you sat through it all you probably wish you had those hours back.

Here's a brief synopsis:

 

  • The H-O-R-S-E- contest was absolutely brutal. None of Kevin Durant, Omri Casspi or Rajon Rondo looked even remotely interested and after an hour the league was forced to turn the contest into a three point shootout. Durant won, but anyone who sat through it came out a loser.
  • The Shooting Stars contest was actually ok, but I am jaded by the fact that we were waging on pretty much everything, including this. This event is good for filling time but I don't know of a single human being who actually looks forward to seeing it. The worst part was Chris Webber who apparently thinks he has fat ankles and wouldn't even take off the warm-up pants.
  • The Skills Contest was probably the high point, mostly because of Steve Nash who is one of the few NBA players who actually looks like he is having fun out there. He has no "tough guy" image to protect so he can ham it up, which he did. His attempt to block Deron Williams final lay-up in final was jokes as was his introductory flex-down.
  • The three point shootout was just bizarre. After Stephon Davidson hit 18 in the first round viewers were told that Paul Pierce and Chauncey Billups (who each hit 17) were going to have a shoot-off to make it to the finals...only for some inexplicable reason (probably in the interest of time after the awfully long H-O-R-S-E game) there was not shoot-off and Paul Pierce took the title. The highlight? Charles Barkley killing Daquan Cook and his inability to get off the bench in Miami.
  • The dunk contest was arguably the worst one in years, if not ever. Shannon Brown and Gerald Wallace embarrassed themselves as they have done better dunks in games and were quickly eliminated. The best dunk was the DeRozan jam off a feed from Sonny Weems (off the backboard), but on a whole it was a non-event. The crowd was dead, the dunks sucked and to top it all of fan voting resulted in a Nate Robinson win solely because his last dunk was better than DeRozan's. There was zero creativity and it left the TNT broadcasters scratching their heads.
The moral of the story? The NBA front office has to breathe some life into the dead body that is All-Star Saturday. If the idea is to feature the leagues All-Stars they should be doing exactly that.

Last night I would have been better off watching Canada take silver in the moguls.