‘Huge Win!’ Bill Simmons Praises NBA All-Star Game’s Resurgence After Years of Lackluster Performances

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Bill Simmons on Sunday praised the NBA for the success of its new All-Star Game format after years of criticism from fans.

Earlier that evening, the NBA debuted a new format pitting American players against international ones. All-Stars were split into three teams: one consisting of young American stars, another consisting of veteran Americans, and a third made up of the NBA’s best foreign-born players. Teams played one another across three games in a round-robin tournament, and the two best teams to come out of that played in a championship game. Each game was a single, 12-minute quarter.

Thanks to the urgency of each game being just a single quarter, play was noticeably more competitive. Although the championship game, which was played between the young American stars and the veterans, was a lopsided one, the round-robin games all came down to the wire with exciting finishes.

Simmons gave the experiment “two thumbs up.”

“I thought it was, a huge win for a league that needed a win this weekend,” Simmons said on his podcast. “I thought it worked, and I think it comes back. And I think, at the very least, with all the other things this league has to solve, it seems like we have found something that might work here with the All-Star game after 15 tries. So maybe there’s hope for the lottery now.”

Simmons’s guest, NBA analyst Zach Lowe, agreed.

“I love USA versus the world,” Lowe said. “Nailed it. Don’t need to change that. Clearly, the game was better. There’s just no question. It, it was a pretty competitive basketball game. There were fouls, there was physicality, all of that.”

In recent years, the NBA and its players have faced harsh criticism for the clear lack of effort in recent All-Star games. In response, the league has experimented with a number of different formats in an effort to keep things fresh and encourage effort from the stars. Days before the event, Fox Sports commentator Nick Wright jokingly suggested the NBA split the teams by race to get the players to play hard.

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