With an awfully busy 2026 NBA trade deadline now in the rear-view mirror, the NBA now trains its gaze on Los Angeles, site of the annual midseason basketball exhibition/convention/trade show/sugar rush that is All-Star Weekend.
Here are a few things to keep an eye on as the league’s best and brightest strut their stuff across three days of basketball-like activities, decidedly un-basketball-like activities prominently featuring The Rizzler and Joey Fatone, and — yet again — a revamped, rebooted game format:
Will the new All-Star format work?
75th NBA All-Star Game: 5 p.m. ET Sunday (NBC/Peacock)
After “final score: 211-186” didn’t work for anybody two years ago, NBA commissioner Adam Silver and his crew of problem-solvers at the league office decided to try to shake things up in pursuit of an answer to stem the tide of the years-long trend: the once-proud Sunday showcase devolving into, ostensibly, a “we’re just here so we won’t get fined” glorified shootaround. That led to a tournament-style structure featuring rosters drafted by the “Inside the NBA” crew, with four teams — “Young Stars,” “Global Stars,” “OGs” and the winners of the Rising Stars Challenge — competing in curtailed pickup-style games in a two-round competition to eventually crown a winner.
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The result? Nobody really seemed to try any harder in three shorter games than they did in the standard-length affair. Nobody seemed to enjoy the changes, from Kevin Hart’s running commentary to MrBeast showing up to sponsor a 3-point shooting exhibition. The whole stop-and-start endeavor ran long and wrapped up late, the finale was as uncompetitive as ever, and the ratings plunged.
So: Back to the drawing board!
(Bruno Rouby/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
“It just makes me think if there was a game of the World vs. USA, that would be interesting,” San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama told reporters before last year’s game. “That would be even better.”
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As it turned out, the big fella was onto something. This year’s tweak from Silver and Co.? A three-team tournament featuring two rosters of American-born players and one of international players, competing in a round-robin tournament consisting of four 12-minute games.
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In the first game, Team USA Stars (Scottie Barnes, Devin Booker, Cade Cunningham, Jalen Duren, Anthony Edwards, Chet Holmgren, Jalen Johnson and Tyrese Maxey) will take on Team World (Wembanyama, Giannis Antetokounmpo*, Deni Avdija, Luka Dončić*, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander**, Nikola Jokić, Jamal Murray, Pascal Siakam, Alperen Şengün, Karl-Anthony Towns).
* Both Antetokounmpo (calf) and Dončić (hamstring) are currently sidelined due to injury; it’s unclear whether they’ll actually be suiting up Sunday.
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** Gilgeous-Alexander (abdominal strain) will miss the All-Star Game; Şengün was named as his replacement.
In the second game, Team USA Stripes (Jaylen Brown, Jalen Brunson, Stephen Curry***, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Donovan Mitchell, Norman Powell) will take on the winner of the opener. In the third game, Stripes will take on the team that lost the opener.
*** Curry (knee) will miss the All-Star Game; Brandon Ingram was named as his replacement.
After the third game, the two teams with the best record will advance to face each other in the championship game. (If all three teams are 1-1 after the third game, point differential will serve as the tiebreaker.)
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Will these changes generate the intended ratcheting-up of intensity that Silver and Co. are seeking? Will the decision to go USA vs. The World at this moment in history perhaps bring about some unintended consequences, like so many other changes instituted by the league office over the years?
Will even further shortening the games — 12 minutes tops, with the event schedule allotting 50 minutes between Games 1 and 2, 30 minutes between Games 2 and 3, and 45 minutes between Game 3 and the championship — put some pep in everybody’s step? I’d guess that the longer gaps between the first two and final two games will make space for some kind of brand activation; I haven’t seen Kevin Hart’s name on a press release, but let’s keep our heads on a swivel out there.
Will basketball fans come away from the festivities waxing poetic about the avalanche of talent from all over the world currently on display in the NBA game? Or, will a weekend that seemingly remains tilted toward content creation, influencers, marketing partnerships and the ongoing grasp for the ever-elusive hem of the garment of What’s Next — once again — leave fans wondering whether something that’s seemed broken for years might not actually be able to reset and heal?
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We’ll find out the answers to those questions, and plenty more, soon enough. This much, though, we know is true: With the opening game scheduled for 5 p.m. and a 7:10 p.m. ET tip in the championship game, it’ll all end a lot earlier. That’s something, you know?
How many names from the rosters for the Ruffles Celebrity Game do I, a 43-year-old father of two, recognize?
Ruffles NBA All-Star Celebrity Game: 7 p.m. ET Friday (ESPN)
You’re not going to believe this, but the answer — for a second straight year — is 13 of 22! More than half! A robust shooting percentage of 59.1% — what Vin Baker shot from the free-throw line during the 1997-98 season! Tremendous work by me.
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I know we all remember every single possession of last year’s Celebrity Game like LeBron holding court after a playoff game, but just in case you need a refresher, it ended with Barry Bonds’ team beating Jerry Rice’s team, and with Rome Flynn taking home MVP honors:
Flynn is back to try to become just the third player in Celebrity Game history to win consecutive MVP awards, joining Jaleel White and Frankie Muniz. (NOTE: This may not be true, but I’m not looking it up, and you can’t make me.) He’ll be playing for a team coached by three Antetokounmpo brothers — sorry, Kostas; maybe next year — and Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Mookie Betts. Among those joining him on Team Antetokounmbros: All-Pro Detroit Lions receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown, Brazilian soccer legend Cafu, ex-NBA players Jeremy Lin and Tacko Fall, comedian/actor Keegan-Michael Key, Charlotte Hornets owner Rick Schnall, and rapper GloRilla, who’ll get to spend All-Star Weekend with beau Ingram, which is nice.
Also on Team Antetokounmbros: NBA newsbreaker Shams Charania, who will have to put his phone(s) down for at least a little while to run up and down the court … which gives Sam Amick, Jake Fischer, Chris Haynes, Chris Mannix and Marc Stein a chance to do the funniest thing ever.
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They’ll be squaring off against a team coached by actor/comedian Anthony Anderson and basketball trainers/content creators Chris Brickley and Lethal Shooter. Their roster includes Pro Bowl L.A. Chargers receiver Keenan Allen, Canadian Olympic sprinting champion Andre De Grasse, ex-NBA player Jason “White Chocolate” Williams, actor Simu Liu, music producer/name to yell Mustard, and Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia. One can only hope that Nikola Jokić decides to make time to sit courtside and renew some unpleasantries.
Which Rising Stars will shine brightest?
Castrol Rising Stars: 9 p.m. ET Friday (Peacock)
For the fifth straight year, the rebooted rookie-sophomore challenge will feature four seven-player teams competing in a three-game Friday night mini-tournament. With the event shifting to Peacock this year, the three teams of first- and second-year NBA players will be coached by Hall of Famers-turned-NBC/Peacock commentators Carmelo Anthony, Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady. A fourth composed of G Leaguers (and rookie Yang Hansen, who has played three G League games and made 32 NBA appearances in Portland, and rookie Yanic Konan Niederhäuser, who has played all of one game for the G League’s San Diego Clippers this season, compared to 32 for the big club) will be coached by fellow NBC/Peacock commentator Austin Rivers.
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Team Melo plays Team Austin. Team Vince plays Team T-Mac. The winners square off for the crown. In each of the first two games, the first team to 40 points wins. In the championship game, though, it’s first to 25, because, y’know, let’s keep this thing moving.
Melo got the first pick in the Rising Stars draft, and selected Dallas Mavericks phenom Cooper Flagg. As someone who recently wrote a big takeout on how Flagg’s real-time growth has put him into some rarefied air among first-year prospects …
… I can’t fault Melo’s drafting much. What I can fault, though, is the fickle nature of the midfoot, because Flagg’s left one is now sprained, which means he will miss this game. Boo, I say. Boo!
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Melo’s squad could still wind up just fine, considering he also landed Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper from San Antonio. I’m not entirely sure how much having a pair of defensive demons will help in this particular context, but it ought to be cool seeing Donovan Clingan try to block everything and Collin Murray-Boyles generally Draymond his way around out there. They might be the team to beat …
… unless, of course, Kon Knueppel — Flagg’s old roommate and his chief rival for Rookie of the Year honors — just decides he will not be denied. Intrigue!
The full Rising Stars rosters:
Team Melo
Cooper Flagg (Dallas Mavericks)*
Reed Sheppard (Houston Rockets)
Stephon Castle (San Antonio Spurs)
Dylan Harper (San Antonio Spurs)
Jeremiah Fears (New Orleans Pelicans)
Donovan Clingan (Portland Trail Blazers)
Collin Murray-Boyles (Toronto Raptors)
* Flagg will miss the Rising Stars Challenge with a left midfoot sprain.
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Team T-Mac
Kon Knueppel (Charlotte Hornets)
Kel’el Ware (Miami Heat)
Tre Johnson (Washington Wizards)
Alex Sarr (Washington Wizards)*
Ajay Mitchell (Oklahoma City Thunder)
Jaylon Tyson (Cleveland Cavaliers)
Cam Spencer (Memphis Grizzlies)
* Sarr will miss the Rising Stars Challenge with a hamstring injury.
Team Vince
VJ Edgecombe (Philadelphia 76ers)
Derik Queen (New Orleans Pelicans)
Kyshawn George (Washington Wizards)
Matas Buzelis (Chicago Bulls)
Egor Dёmin (Brooklyn Nets)
Cedric Coward (Memphis Grizzlies)
Jaylen Wells (Memphis Grizzlies)
Team Austin
Sean East II (Salt Lake City Stars)
Ron Harper Jr. (Maine Celtics)
David Jones Garcia (Austin Spurs) [injured, will not play]
Yanic Konan Niederhäuser (San Diego Clippers)
Alijah Martin (Raptors 905)
Tristen Newton (Rio Grande Valley Vipers)
Yang Hansen (Rip City Remix)
Mac McClung (Chicago Bulls) [named as Jones Garcia’s replacement]
[checks list of events] Hey, what happened to the Skills Challenge?
I think CP3 and Wemby broke it?
After last year’s competition included one team getting disqualified in the first round for not taking shots, a flagrant flouting of the spirit of the contest aimed at gaining whatever edge there was to gain — a.k.a. The Most Chris Paul S*** Imaginable (Complimentary) — the NBA, it seems, elected to pivot. So long, Skills Challenge; welcome back, Shooting Stars!
Wait, what was the deal with Shooting Stars again?
Kia Shooting Stars: second event of All-Star Saturday, starting at 5 p.m. ET (NBC/Peacock)
Instead of a timed competition in which you have to throw chest passes and bounce passes through moving targets, Shooting Stars is a timed competition in which four different three-person teams — two current players, one former NBA player — have to make a bunch of shots from seven different spots on the court.
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You know who was kind of a mack at Shooting Stars? Chris Bosh, Swin Cash and Dominique Wilkins were kind of macks at Shooting Stars.
The four teams vying to walk in the dynastic footsteps of Bosh, Cash and Wilkins:
Team All-Star
Scottie Barnes (Toronto Raptors)
Chet Holmgren (Oklahoma City Thunder)
Team Cameron (as in, Cameron Indoor Stadium; as in, Dukies)
Jalen Johnson (Atlanta Hawks)
Kon Knueppel (Charlotte Hornets)
Team Harper
Dylan Harper (San Antonio Spurs)
Ron Harper Jr. (Boston Celtics)
Ron Harper Sr. (five-time NBA champion, proud papa, Doberman)
Team Knicks
Jalen Brunson (New York Knicks)
Karl-Anthony Towns (… um, New York Knicks)
Allan Houston (… I mean, two-time All-Star as a Knick, and now the Knicks’ VP of player leadership and development)
Teams get 70 seconds to score points while rotating through the seven different shooting locations, with all three players proceeding in a set order. The first three shots — a layup/dunk from the right side of the lane, an 18-foot shot from the right baseline, a jumper from the right elbow — are all worth two points. The fourth, a 3-pointer from the right wing, is worth, well, three.
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Next: a top-of-the-key jumper worth two points. Rounding things out: a left-corner 3 worth, again, three, and finally, a shot from the logo that’s worth … four. All four teams compete in the first round, with the two highest-scoring teams advancing to compete for the title.
Things might get tricky! Every player has to shoot from every location, and you can’t advance from one location to another until everybody has taken a shot from the first spot. Players have to shoot in a predetermined order, and points scored on out-of-order shots won’t count; if you shoot out of order on the 4-pointer, you don’t get to shoot again. There is legitimately a PDF with tiebreaker policies and examples of shooting orders that would violate the rules. It’s all very serious.
A referee will be on hand “to enforce rules and make judgments on any potential rules violation” — including, if need be, the call to invoke instant replay review. Let’s all say a prayer to our respective gods that that won’t be necessary.
Wait a sec — is Damian Lillard really in the 3-Point Contest again?
State Farm 3-Point Contest: first event of All-Star Saturday, starting at 5 p.m. ET (NBC/Peacock)
Yep! Despite missing the entirety of the 2025-26 NBA season to date as he rehabilitates his surgically repaired Achilles tendon, Dame’s back to take a second crack at winning a third 3-point shootout crown, joining Larry Bird and Craig Hodges as only the third player in the competition’s 40-year history to three-peat. (That one is real. I looked it up.)
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It’s kind of weird, though you’d assume that none of the stakeholders involved — Lillard and his reps, the Portland Trail Blazers (to whom, in case you forgot, he returned after the Milwaukee Bucks waived him this summer), the league office … hell, State Farm — would’ve greenlit this if it wasn’t deemed 1000% safe for Dame to do some light jogging and stationary shooting. Here’s hoping any extant concerns about it all melt away after the first couple of jumpers go up, replaced by the warm, fuzzy feeling of watching one of the greatest shooters of all time get ‘em up again.
Lillard will face some stiff competition from a field featuring five All-Stars (Tyrese Maxey, Devin Booker, Donovan Mitchell, Jamal Murray, Norman Powell); rookie sharpshooter Knueppel, who ranks second in the NBA in total made 3-pointers, behind only Mitchell, and who’s drilling his triples at a 43% clip for the Hornets; and former teammate Bobby Portis Jr., who feels like an odd inclusion … until you realize he’s shooting a blistering 45.6% from deep this season.
The rules remain broadly the same: five racks; five balls each; shoot and make as many as you can in 70 seconds. Four racks feature a money ball worth two points; one rack consists entirely of money balls. The competition also now features two “From the Logo” balls, placed on pedestals six feet behind the 3-point arc on either side of the half-court logo, that are worth three points apiece. (To get credit for those, players have to begin their shooting motion with at least one foot on the “From the Logo” floor decal, a la Caitlin Clark in the ads.)
Eight shooters enter the contest; the three highest scorers advance to the final; one leaves with the bragging rights. And, presumably, the undying loyalty and respect of Jake.
What excitement can be ginned up about the Dunk Contest?
AT&T Slam Dunk Contest: third event of All-Star Saturday, starting at 5 p.m. ET (NBC/Peacock)
Let’s check in with one of the people you’d presume would be most jazzed about the contest — one of the four people actually competing in it. Take it away, rookie Orlando Magic guard Jase Richardson:
… OK!
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While Richardson — son of Dunk Contest legend Jason Richardson — later clarified that he will, in fact, try hard to win the contest, his reaction is A) not exactly the greatest advertisement for the festivities and B) … kind of the way it seems like most folks react to the Dunk Contest nowadays?
I will reiterate my long-held stance that dunk contests can really only ever be kind of bad, because dunking, like pizza, is at worst always at least pretty good. I suspect that this year’s contest — featuring Richardson, Lakers center Jaxson Hayes (provided he can avoid fighting any mascots on the way out to the court), Heat swingman Keshad Johnson and Spurs rookie wing Carter Bryant — will not immediately stir the hearts and minds of observers desperate for a return to the days of bona fide, marquee, household-name superstars performing feats of aerial acrobatics and derring-do the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Maybe that’s on us, though. I watched last year’s competition with my daughters, and it was pretty hard to convince them not to get amped up about what Stephon Castle did …
… or Mac McClung doing what he does best …
… because of what Vince Carter did in 2000, or Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon did a decade ago.
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They saw dudes flying through the air, jumping over stuff, twisting and detonating. They thought it was pretty cool, all things considered.
Like I said last year: In dunk contests, as in difficult times, hope dies last. As long as they keep having them, we’ll keep showing up, hoping that the next takeoff is the one that returns us to the joys of competitions past. And if not … well, “pretty cool” might not seem like much in the context of both what we’ve watched in years past and what we’ve imagined might be possible if the moment’s most explosive vertical athletes — LeBron in his day, Zion and Ja a few years ago, Ant and VJ Edgecombe now — decided to show up. But when the other alternative is just being preemptively mad and disappointed about whatever dunks the competitors we actually do have are about to try, then “pretty cool” ain’t half-bad.
What’s most likely to breathe new life into the All-Star Game?
I think the goal is, “Find some way to replicate the fourth quarters of U.S. vs. Serbia and U.S. vs. France from the 2024 Summer Olympics.”
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Given the Grand Canyon-sized chasm in stakes between “we’re playing for a chance at Olympic gold” and “we’re playing for a bunch of marketing managers from Salesforce,” though … I kind of think the answer might be, “Team World just absolutely dusts both U.S. teams.”
It’s not exactly hot-take artistry to say that, while the U.S. still produces more great basketball players than other countries throughout the world, the very best players of this age — the ones routinely topping MVP ballots and stocking the All-NBA First Team — were born elsewhere. Most of those guys, with the exception of the injured SGA, are about to suit up against two teams full of Americans; it wouldn’t necessarily be shocking if they just mopped up the Stars and Stripes. If that happened, the resultant reaction might not be altogether pretty; it might be forceful enough, though, to reignite the competitive fires in an event where the embers have long since grown cold.
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