As you may have guessed from a certain previous article, I have a bit of a love for basketball. Everything about it is perfect; the level of competition is at a place no other sport has, stars are littered around the league, players can have their own opinions, and All-Star Weekend is by far the best All-Star weekend in any professional sport, except for Friday. . . we don’t talk about the celebrity game. The stars come out, and everyone attends, but Saturday night is broken. The ideas behind each challenge are solid and each should exist, it’s just that it's not good anymore. The best way to attest to this is to look at the participants this year. The skills competition has a mix of low level and near all-stars, the 3-point contest doesn’t even have the best 3-point shooters in the league, and the slam dunk contest had a single player in it that starts on a consistent basis this year.

Let’s start with the Skill Competition. It’s less of a skills competition, and more of a middle school basketball drill. The players dribble around some cones, make a chest pass, run down the court and score on a layup, and then come back down and shoot a 3. None of this actually highlights their skills. Break it up, and get rid of the 3-point section and layup, as those are already covered in the 3-point contest, and slam dunk contest.

Instead of dribbling back and forth around some cones, get the best ball handlers in the league out there against each other and see who can make it down the court the fastest getting around each other in the most fast, most creative ways possible. Can you imagine Jamal Crawford, Kyrie, Steph, and Cardiac Kemba out there all trying to break each other’s ankles and trying to get by each other? Bring in the Slam Dunk Contest’s reaction cam and get their teammates in the front row losing their minds as they watch their teammates break their rival's ankles.

Now bear with me here because this may sound just a little ridiculous, but no one cares about who can make a chest pass through a hole 10 feet away. Make them put some distance on it, or at least make them channel their inner White Chocolate, and get fancy with their passes and get three judges out there to judge it just like the dunk contest currently, based on level of difficulty.

Both of these fixes add a bit of time, but they get the crowd involved and really show off who’s the best at each thing so they get their bragging rights back, instead of saying that they’re the best at being average. Congrats! Here’s a trophy for doing what you do every single day at practice better than a couple of other above average players!

Now, the 3-point contest, this is the one contest that needs the least tweaking. That being said, with the way the NBA is moving, we should make this the primetime event so flip the order of events so that it goes; Skills Competition, Slam Dunk Contest, and then 3-Point Contest. The only real change that should be added is to add more time, and an extra rack. The NBA is changing and players are shooting from further behind the line every single game. It’s not good enough anymore to have a solid 3-point shot from the line, you need to be able to shoot from another three to five feet back at least, and the contest should reflect that. Give the shooters the original four racks with one money ball each, and their one with all money balls, but then have a rack a little past half court filled with money balls so that players with range can get an extra reward as well.

The only other problem with the contest is the lack of true stars in it this year. Of the seven contestants, only one of them ranks in the top ten in three-point field goal percentage. While that statistic is slightly biased, as percentage doesn’t speak to the average difficulty of the shot, it still shows the lack of accuracy by many of the contestants. Wesley Matthews is currently 54th in three-point field goal percentage in the league. Back in the day Larry Bird came to the three-point contest and didn’t even take off his warm up jacket saying to the rest of the contestants, “I hope all you guys in here are thinking about second place, because I’m winning this”. Can you imagine the contests we could be having right now if Steph continued to participate? We could have a 3-pt contest this year of; J.J. Reddick, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Damian Lillard, James Harden, Kyle Korver, and Danny Green. The fans would show up and the players would all go out there to prove who’s really the best.

The Slam Dunk contest has the same problem. As I said earlier, only one player this year is currently a starter on a regular basis. Back in the day, Michael Jordan competed. Michael fricking Jordan, the best player in the history of the NBA. Today, Aaron Gordon and Zach Lavine are the stars of the contest, and they’ve both already said that they won’t compete again. The NBA can’t get the star caliber players to compete in what used to be the highlight of the night. There are any number of ways that have been suggested to get big name players involved in the contests again, ranging from a million-dollar payout to the winner, to it affecting playoff tiebreakers. The best I have heard is a payout to the charity of the winner’s choice. Just giving the player a million dollars is nothing to players like Lebron James or Russell Westbrook, who everyone wants to see in the slam dunk contest. I refuse to let anything in All-Star weekend, effect the competitiveness in the Regular Season, and the already ridiculous playoffs. A charity payout, would essentially peer pressure the stats into competing. Which in a way was already done this past weekend after the three-point contest. After the contest was over, EJ came out and enlisted the help of many of the best shooters in the league, because for every three-pointer made in a minute $10,000 would be donated to the Sager Strong foundation. They also brought in a couple of less-than athletes (DJ Khaled) so they wouldn’t have to pay out too much, but the idea remains the same - make players pay for charity, and they risk looking like compassionless people to the public if they don't play.

Now for the actual changes involved with the dunk contest. Number 1- making the judges be a bit more critical of the dunks themselves. There were dunks this past weekend and in previous years that were giving 50’s and scores in the high 40’s that in no way deserved to be that high. You can’t be rewarding average, boring, and unoriginal dunks. Aaron Gordon was such a hit last year because he was doing things we had never seen before. Getting the mascot involved by jumping over him on a hoverboard, while still going between the legs is unheard of. Even this year, his failed drone dunk was still the highlight of the dunk contest because everything else the other players did had been done before. On top of being harsher in the grading, we need to reward getting the dunk right on the first dunk. While what the players are doing is impressive no matter how long it takes, it will never be as exciting as watching them nail perfect dunk after perfect dunk and surprising the crowd every time. It gets the crowd, players, and viewers at home hyped up and waiting in anticipation for what they’re going to do next. As opposed to watching a player attempt a dunk and then waiting to see if they can even do what they’re trying to do. I don’t think they should be punished for using all three attempts, but judges should have a way to reward getting something right on the first try. A simple solution to this is to add an extra point to the judges score if a player gets the dunk right on the first try, making a true perfect score a 55 instead of the old 50. As long as the judges aren’t too lenient in their scoring of the dunks, this keeps the players wanting to try innovative new things, while giving them the added incentive of getting it right on the first try.

While this restructures an entire night of the All-Star weekend, I firmly believe that every change would bring in more viewers in person, on tv, and various other streaming services, which is nothing but good news for everyone involved. The NBA gets to grow the game as the night is more entertaining (and benefit from the money that comes with increased viewership), players get to get their name out there even more, and the audience gets a more entertaining night of basketball. It’s a win-win-win situation, so why not?