For the first time the NBA All-Star Weekend Rising Stars Challenge teams were decided by a draft. This draft was not like any draft, because the people drafting the teams were former NBA All-Stars and current TNT analysts Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neil. The two personalities went back and fourth picking the most talented first and second year players the NBA has to offer in the first game combining the talents of both the 2010 and 2011 drafts.
The entire draft was a great marketing campaign for the NBA and TNT. Barkley and O’Neil are two faces of the NBA that any casual fan can recognize, and they commercialized something that was never a big deal before. TNT created an entire new draft show based around the game, and they also started a twitter campaign encouraging fanes to participate in predicting the game winning team, and the picks. Fans however, were robbed of classic Rookie vs. Sophomore battles that they have become accustomed to.
The changes made to the game this year were unnecessary and done to create a greater revenue base around the game and All-Star weekend. In the decade plus that the game had previously been played the format of putting the rookie players against sophomore players worked out fine. If anything it created a better competitive advantage because the rookies wanted to beat out the sophomores, and the sophomores did not want to get embarrassed by the rookies. The rookies had even won two of the last three challenges before the change was made.
This year’s game was won by team Chuck with a cast of six sophomore and four rookies, opposed to Shaq’s losing team with six rookies and four sophomores. Team Chuck was led by second overall pick Kyrie Irving who led the game in points and assists, dropping 34, and 9. Hopefully the marketing nonsense will end next year and the traditional format of Rookies vs. Sophomores will return for all of our viewing pleasures. Here’s to making it more about the game than the marketing and the money.
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