Why is the league constantly messing with the all-star game? The team captains thing was okay. The target score thing was convoluted and stupid. Last year's tournament made the weekend seem like less of an event. The idea of a game pitting American and international players is interesting, but why can't it just be two twelve man teams with the starters picked by the fans and the reserves picked by the coaches who go on to play four quarters of regular basketball?
Do I just sound like an angry old man?
The NBA announced its long-awaited plans to overhaul the All-Star Game Tuesday night, laying out how the new "United States once again versus the World" format will go and how the teams will be formed.
Beyond the obvious change, going to a three-team format featuring eight-man rosters -- two of which will be made up of American players, and a third of international selections -- there are a couple of changes to how those players will be selected.
The basics -- five starters and seven reserves from each conference, with a combination of fans, media and players voting for the starters and coaches picking the reserves -- remain unchanged. What is different, though, is that there will no longer be any positional requirements.
In the past, the starters have been made up of two backcourt players and three frontcourt players, with the reserves being the same split plus two wild cards. This year, though, the starters will be the five top vote-getters, regardless of position, and the reserves will be the top seven, also regardless of position.
The league answered another lingering question -- what happens if those 24 players do not evenly break down into 16 American and eight international players? Or would the league force the voting to adhere to those numbers?
The solution is that if the player pool doesn't reflect that 16-8 split, NBA commissioner Adam Silver will name extra players to the roster to get to the minimum 16 Americans or the minimum eight international players.
So if there are 14 Americans and 10 international players, Silver would name two more Americans to get to the 16-player minimum. And if it was an 18-6 split, he would name two international players to get to the eight-player minimum.
Both the NBA and NBC -- which is taking over the All-Star Game broadcast after it has spent the past couple of decades on TNT as part of the league's new television agreement this year -- are hoping this change will breathe life into an event that Silver has repeatedly tried to get players to invest more energy into over the past few years.
Part of the appeal of the international format, for NBC's purposes, is that All-Star Weekend is being built into the network's coverage of the Winter Olympic Games in February.
