INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The lights glitzed. The stars glamored. But All-Star weekend has lacked the Hollywood spectacle it’s known for.
What once crackled with electricity now flickers like a neon sign at closing time—bright enough to see, dim enough to disappoint.
The City of Angels played host to a party where half the guests never showed, and the ones who did kept checking their watches. Not because the night was young, but because the night was over before it ever began.
Welcome to the NBA’s flagship weekend, now operating on Olympic time.
The first two days arrived with a bureaucratic whisper—events compressed, creativity constrained, the whole mechanical affair squeezed into a five-hour window before curling and cross-country skiing commandeered the airwaves.
Blame greed? Blame the NBC partnership that has transformed basketball’s grandest showcase into a speed-run spectacle?
The league that built its empire on star power now finds its constellation eclipsed by bobsleds and biathlons.
Day two arrived with promises of resurrection. What it delivered was redundancy.
Damian Lillard stood at the three-point line at Intuit Dome, launching pellets into Pacific air, each splash sending a ripple through a crowd that actually cared.
He hasn’t played a game all season.
His Achilles spent the first half of the season in recovery mode. And still, he shot 29 in the final round—two points better than Devin Booker, who sat stunned after missing his last three money balls, frozen in the corner like a man who just watched his ride leave without him.
“I came in confident,” Lillard said. “I’m fresh.
He joined Larry Bird and Craig Hodges as the only three-time winners of the 3-point contest.
It was a moment. A real one.
A feel-good story that would have led every sports highlight package from here to Portland—had anyone actually seen it.
But here’s the thing about All-Star Saturday night: most people weren’t watching.
They were somewhere else.
At parties. At dinners. At events scheduled directly against the NBA’s flagship appetizer.
Because the league, handcuffed by its media partnership with NBC, is forced to cram all of the events before 5 p.m.
Why? The Winter Olympics.
Curling. Downhill skiing. Speed skating.
That’s the competition. A rock sliding across ice has more network priority than the slam dunk contest.
Say it slow. Let it land.
The league that once owned Sunday night now rents Saturday afternoon.
The slam dunk contest—birthplace of legends, forge of icons—has been replaced with curling, downhill skiing and speed skating.
Dominique soared here. Jordan flew here. Vince Carter turned Toronto into Olympus, and now Olympus broadcasts actual Olympians while basketball waits in the green room.
Silicon Valley had much to be desired when ingenuity, power and artistry intersected in the slam dunk contest. Instead, we received Silicon Valley efficiency—streamlined, scheduled, soulless.
“Dunking is an art,” Keshad Johnson said, the Miami Heat forward who somehow emerged as the winner. “It’s kind of hard to come up with new stuff each and every way.”
He’s right. It is hard.
But that’s the point. The difficulty is the drama.
The struggle births the spectacular. Art without ambition is craft. Craft without risk is commerce. And Saturday night, there was no spectacular.
There was no showmanship. There was no buzz.
The event that gave us Dominique’s windmill, Jordan’s free-throw line, Vince Carter’s arm-in-the-rim mortuary slam.
The event that turned ordinary February into a myth-making machine.
That cathedral of flight, that museum of human possibility, devolved into a recital of greatest hits we’ve heard too many times.
Between-the-legs, again. Between-the-legs, still. Between-the-legs, forever.
The same recycled dunks we’ve seen over the years, stripped of narrative, stripped of nerve, stripped of the very thing that once made us lean forward in our living rooms: the unknown.
Jaxson Hayes, the Lakers’ leaper, took off from the dotted line and performed an in-game, one-handed slam. It was a travesty to the event and its history—a dunk you could witness on any Tuesday in March, presented on Valentine’s weekend as though it were a love letter.
The hometown crowd cheered politely. The judges scored generously. The basketball gods wept silently.
Jace Richardson, carrying his father’s legacy like both armor and anchor, nearly sent himself to the ER on a failed dunk.
The son of two-time champion Jason Richardson, young Jase finished last at 88.8, his evening ending not with triumph but with near triage.
That near-miss with injury was the most exciting moment: near bodily harm masquerading as entertainment.
The arena seemed to sigh, “There was no real showmanship.”
There was no real buzz or excitement. How could there be?
The answer arrived in fragments, in the spaces between the action.
Journalists and fans who have come for the parties have to choose between the All-Star events and the concurrent parties.
The NBA has engineered a conflict it cannot win—basketball competing with bass lines, dunks competing with DJ sets, the game competing with the gravitational pull of Hollywood nightlife.
When your own audience would rather network than witness, you have built an empty theater.
The final round of the dunk contest arrived like a punchline.
Johnson versus San Antonio’s Carter Bryant. Two Arizona products. Two guys struggled to convince us that this sham still matters.
Bryant scored the only perfect 50 of the night—an alley-oop off the floor, through his legs, one-handed finish.
The kind of dunk that makes you lean forward. For one moment, the old electricity returned.
Then came the anticlimax.
Bryant needed only a 47.6 to win. He missed his first attempt. Then missed again.
Gift-wrapped the trophy. Hand-delivered it. Johnson won with a final-round score of 97.4, which sounds official until you realize Bryant essentially forfeited.
The trophy changed hands not through conquest but through concession.
Johnson’s clinching dunk? A bounce off the floor, between the legs, baseline reverse.
But not championship stuff. Not “put this in the time capsule” stuff. Competent, clean, forgotten by morning.
“Everyone make some noise,” Johnson said. “It’s a dream. I beat the odds. Every year I watched the dunk contest and I learned from all the people before me.”
He learned. But what did he inherit?
The 6-foot-6-inch Heat forward, undrafted and G League-tested, leaped over Bay Area rapper E-40 on his first dunk and finished with a windmill jam that at least suggested joy.
“I’m from Oakland, the West Coast is home to me and I felt like the fans were with me,” Johnson said.
Perhaps they were—the ones who remained, the ones who chose basketball over bass drops, the ones who still believe that Saturday night should mean something.
But belief requires nourishment. And this weekend starved its faithful.
The 3-point contest saved the night. Lillard, Booker, Charlotte rookie Kon Knueppel—they shot. They competed. They gave the building something to cheer for.
Lillard’s journey here is its own kind of poetry.
Torn Achilles in April. Surgery in May. Waived by Milwaukee via the stretch provision in July.
He signed a three-year, $42 million deal to return to Portland—the franchise that drafted him, the city that raised him. He hasn’t played a game this season.
But Saturday, he shot like he’d been hoisting all along.
“I don’t have to go out there and play 40 minutes, 35 minutes,” Lillard said. “Just having this year to be away, my mind and body are just fresh.”
He was serious when Michael Levine, the NBA’s senior vice president of entertainment and player marketing, called him back. The conversation started as a joke, the way most honest things do. Lillard and Levine were discussing vacation plans when the nine-time All-Star offered to put his trip on hold.
“I was like, ‘If y’all need somebody to shoot, I’m available to do it,'” Lillard said. “We laughed about it.”
The laughter faded. The spot opened. Levine reached out.
“He was like, ‘Were you serious about that?’ And I was like, ‘You know that I’m always serious. If there’s a spot, sign me up.'”
That’s the difference. Willing participants. Stars who understand what they mean to the product.
Booker, the 2018 winner in Los Angeles, pushed Lillard to the edge.
He scored 30 in the first round—one shy of the record. Then watched his final money balls rim out, clank, die.
“That’ll sting me for some time,” Booker said.
That’s competition. That’s stakes. That’s what the dunk contest used to have.
Lillard is the second player to compete in the 3-point contest while rehabbing a torn Achilles. Voshon Lenard did it in 2005. Now Lillard joins that tiny fraternity, plus the Bird-Hodges three-timers club.
“It’s not the injury that it used to be,” Lillard said. “It’s something you can come back and have another prime from.”
Another prime. Another chance. Another weekend, perhaps, where the lights don’t just glitz but genuinely glow.
The Shooting Stars competition returned after a 10-year absence.
Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Allan Houston. They beat Team Cameron—Duke guys Jalen Johnson, Knueppel and Corey Maggette—47-38.
Brunson, ever the pragmatist, noted: “This was cool and the game’s become more and more international. Basketball is a universal language.”
But universal languages require universal listeners. And too many ears were elsewhere—at parties, in traffic, watching athletes in spandex navigate snow.
The NBA is a star-driven league that has forgotten that its superstars push the game forward.
Names like Dominique, Jordan, Larry Nance, Kobe Bryant, and Carter are etched in our memory for awe-inspiring and innovative moments.
We remember not just the dunks but the daring—the way Jordan took off from the free-throw line as though physics were a suggestion, the way Carter turned the 2000 contest into a collective gasp, the way these moments transcended sport and entered mythology.
What will we remember from 2025?
The scheduling conflict? The early curtain? The between-the-legs dunks we’ve seen over the years, executed by players whose names we’ll struggle to recall?
The structural problem remains: the NBA, due to its media partnership with NBC, is forced to cram all these events into the 5 p.m. window because the Winter Olympics require prime-time slots.
Curling requires prime windows.
Downhill skiing requires prime windows.
Speed skating requires prime windows.
Blame greed? Stones and ice and Norwegians with sleek suits have replaced the league’s flagship weekend.
When the NBA’s business partners vie for the time and attention of journalists and fans, the events lose—every time.
There is no real buzz. No real excitement.
How could there be when the schedule screams “secondary”?
Lillard stood at the podium afterward, talking about recovery, about belief, about a conversation that started as a joke and ended with history.
He was talking about his body. He could have been talking about the weekend.
The arena emptied. The parties raged on. And somewhere, Dominique Wilkins—judge for the evening, witness to the decline—surely remembered when flight meant transcendence, when stars didn’t just glamor but genuinely gleamed, when All-Star weekend was an event rather than an obligation, a revelation rather than a recital, a dream rather than a schedule to keep.
The lights glitzed. The stars glamored. The clock struck five, and Cinderella’s carriage turned back into programming blocks—curling, downhill skiing and speed skating, the new royalty of winter Sundays.
The NBA’s flagship weekend has been replaced, and we are left to wonder whether it was stolen or surrendered, whether the league was conquered by Olympic scheduling or complicit in its own diminishment.
Blame greed? Blame the times? Blame the between-the-legs dunks, endless and eternal, circling back on themselves like a snake consuming its own tail?
All-Star Saturday used to be appointment viewing. Appointment arguing. Appointment remembering.
Now? It’s an appetizer before the Olympics.
A placeholder before curling. A negotiation between network obligations and what the game actually needs.
The lights glitzed. The stars glamored. But Hollywood, for one February weekend, felt very far away.
The spectacle? That’s on ice.