Well we don’t have to wonder what Kevin Durant thinks about the new format for the NBA All-Star Game.
The Phoenix Suns superstar was asked Tuesday about the new setup, which features a mini tournament of four teams. In his typical honest fashion, he didn’t mince words.
“I hate it, I absolutely hate it,” Durant said. “Terrible. All-Star Game format changing, all the formats — terrible in my opinion. We should just go back to East-West. Just play a game. I think we’ve been trying to bring that flare back somehow with All-Star Weekend, I think we just keep the tradition. We’ll see how this one works. You never know, I might be wrong, I’m just another guy with an opinion, but we’ll see how it works.”
Durant is at least leaving the door open to like the new format, but it’s never a great sign when one of the biggest stars in the league immediately slams something that the NBA is trying to hype up.
What is the new NBA All-Star Game format?
The league announced the new format on Tuesday, which will have the 24 All-Stars chosen split up into three teams of eight players. A fourth team will also compete, which will be the winning team from the Rising Stars Challenge, which follows a similar mini-tournament style.
Instead of NBA players drafting their teams as the league has done the past several years to drum up some excitement and break away from the traditional Western vs. Eastern Conference format, the three All-Star teams will be drafted by “NBA on TNT” analysts Shaquille O’Neal, Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith. The draft will take place on Feb. 6.
Once the rosters are set, there will be three games that take place on All-Star Sunday night, two semifinal matches and a championship game. Two All-Star teams will face each other in one semifinal, while the third All-Star team will face the winner of the Rising Stars Challenge in the second semifinal game. The winner of each match will meet in the championship game. All three games will be played to 40 points.
There is a prize pool of $1.8 million with each player on the championship-winning team getting $125,000. Additionally, players on the second-place team get $50,000 and players on the teams that lose in the semifinals get $25,000.
NBA trying to generate more competitiveness from players
It’s a drastic change from anything the league has ever done for the All-Star Game, but they’ve been trying for years to get people to care about this game. It doesn’t help when players have practically decided that no defense will be played, resulting in ridiculously high-scoring affairs. You would think those are entertaining, but in actuality they have just been a snooze fest of wide-open 3s and uncontested dunks.
The last compelling All-Star Game we got was in 2020 when the league added the Elam Ending for the first time. When things got down to the wire, we saw guys like Kyle Lowry taking charges, something we’d never thought we’d see in an All-Star setting.
Capturing that excitement, or even turning things back to when players actually tried to play defense throughout the entire game, has been a problem that’s been extremely difficult for the league to solve. It’s seemingly unsolvable unless the players decide they want to actually compete and not put on the world’s least-entertaining exhibition game.
The league is going to need major buy-in from its players in order to make this format work, and if Durant’s reaction is any indication, this new style may fail just like the versions before it.
