All-Star Weekend Approval Ratings

As always, it was a jam-packed All-Star Weekend, full of the NBA's most sublime and ridiculous--new acting commissioner Adam Silver kept referring to it as All-Star Week, even though I don't recall any of us getting invited to too many Tuesday and Wednesday events, so I can only assume the comment was a reference to how busy the weekend was. Rather than go through the events one by one, I prefer to discuss the weekend as one long event, and just break down the many parts of it I feel were worth remembering and discussing. I've rated said items on a descending scale of approval, with 100% being the events I found the most transcendent and awe-inspiring, and 0% the most obnoxious and soul-deadening. 
 

Come relive All-Star Weekend's many highs and lows with me. Maybe read from the bottom up if you don't want the experience to end as anti-climactically as the All-Star Game itself. 

100%

The Tim Hardaway Jr. vs. Dion Waiters Rising Stars Duel

The LeBron/Durant showdown everyone was so openly pining for yesterday actually happened on Friday Night, between two bench dudes on disastrous teams who seem otherwise unlikely to be playing on All-Star Sunday any time soon. For about five minutes of game action in the Rising Stars Challenge--which I'm gonna refer to from here on as the Rookie-Sophomore Game because f--- it, it's still the Rookie-Sophomore Game--there was simply no upstaging Dion Waiters and Tim Hardaway Jr., who absolutely took the game over for their respective sides, going at each other with hard drives, ankle-breaking crossovers and successively further three-point pull-ups like there was something far greater at stake than a goofy trophy that keeps falling apart. It's pretty much guaranteed to be the high point of the season (if not their entire early careers) for both players, anyway. 

Best of all, it inspired this Kevin Durant ass shimmy, for which 100% is not nearly high enough an approval rating, and which in itself is just about the ultimate 100% approval rating: 

Does this mean that the two remaining games between the Cavs and Knicks this year are gonna somehow not be the most depressing games of the NBA season? I'm not ready to commit to that just yet, but at least it's a possibility now.

The Arne Duncan Over-the-Shoulder No-Look Whip-Pass.

Look, you don't need me to tell you how great US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was in the All-Star Celebrity Game on Friday night. If you weren't watching while he was putting up a near triple-double in a game where most players don't put enough stats of any kind to put up a near-anything, and you missed Jon Barry speaking in tongues on the call about the man he dubbed "Oscar" Duncan, you've probably heard enough on the internet by now over the last three All-Star Weekends to know that this guy is a little bit better than not only your average 49-year-old politician, but also your average 30-something celebrity hoops aspirant, 40-something ex-NBA star, or even 20-something current WNBA fixture. And he is, but if you didn't want to take the time to watch the man go to work this Valentine's Day, whatever, your loss.

But you will watch this pass. Because over three nights full of the NBA's most impressive players pulling out all their most impressive tricks, this pass was easily the most jaw-dropping thing that happened all weekend.

You need educating, Michael B. Jordan and Jesse Williams. Gotta go to school.

Pharrell's Pre-Game Concert.

I've spent so many words during so many All-Star Weekends complaining about the utter ineptitude of the NBA's powers that be to put together a musical showcase worthy of the world's coolest sport--especially during last year's humiliating musical s---show--that I never even contemplated how great it would be if they actually got it right for once. Last night, they got it right a couple times, but none more emphatically than during Pharrell's pre-game show, which overlapped with player introductions for the teams and got the night started on the good foot, and then some.

I mean really guys, it's not that hard. When there's a guy out there who's not only worked on at least a quarter of all the most beloved hip-hop hits of the 21st century--most of which make for perfect instrumental player intro music--but has also sang on a trio of the most fun, agreeable and exciting pop smashes of the past twelve months, then yeah, you should maybe invite him and his big-ass hat to come along. Basketball Twitter is not an easily impressed clique when it comes to All-Star concerting, but if there was a single voice of dissension in the praise chorus of Pharrell's pre-All-Star gig, it was thankfully absent from my timeline.

It's gonna suck twice as hard next year when we get Flo Rida or OneRepublic instead, though. Perhaps it would have been kinder to have never known what was possible.

90%

John Wall's Dunk Contest-winning slam

I'm not so sure that Wall's dunk was an all-timer, or that it had the power to bring the Dunk Contest Back (as it so desperately always seems to need bringing) or anything like that. But what I think the Wall dunk did is that it reminded us how much more a good dunk looks like a great dunk (or a great dunk like a classic dunk) when you get it right on the first try. I don't know if Wall's double-pump over-the-mascot throwdown was in itself that much greater than, say, Paul George's through-the-legs windmill:

But the fact that Wall just strolled up and nailed the high-degree-of-difficulty slam on his first go gave it that air of effortless brilliance and intoxicating cockiness that's simply not possible to produce after you've already tried and failed at it three times. And the dance Wall and George did to celebrate the make was what really sealed the deal--the spillover swag just flowing through the both of them, making the dunk even more impressive in retrospect.

That was a little more than nice, Chuck. 

Gary Clark Jr.'s National Anthem

A little too much slide-wailing at the end of each line, perhaps, but to say that Clark's soulful and shockingly captivating instrumental was the coolest Star-Spangled Banner since Marvin Gaye's classic rendition at the '83 game would probably be a little bit too close to implying that any of the 30 versions between them were even worth discussing.

The fact that there isn't a better YouTube of this performance out there than this is pretty gross. Where you at, Jose3030?

80%

Kevin Hart abdicating the All-Star Celebrity throne to Arne Duncan

You're not often gonna find a ton of cause for legitimate grievance as concerns the MVP award for the exhibitioniest of sports exhibition games--the friggin' Harlem Globetrotters were playing in this thing up until a couple years ago--but it says something about how good Duncan was in that game that even Kevin Hart had to stop clowning for about half a minute to make sure that the Secretary of Education was given his propers.

If Hart had somehow managed to go the whole thing without pimping About Last Night, I could've gone as high as 90% for this. Too much to ask, undoubtedly.

Kendrick Lamar on Saturday Night

Not quite as much fun as Pharrell, but again, so good and so obvious that it just felt stupid in retrospect that the best Saturday Night act we had last year was Fall Out Boy with a shoehorned-in 2 Chainz guest verse. The decision not to perform an NBA-themed spin on his "Control" verse was something of a historic missed opportunity, but Basketball Twitter can only handle so much rapture in one weekend, I suppose.

Michael B. Jordan's Rajon Rondo move

Where Gerald Wallace at, String?? WHERE GERALD WALLACE AT??

70%

Trombone Shorty & Company's Halftime Show

Plenty fun times, but an inevitable comedown after Pharrell and Kendrick Lamar. Pretty sure Dr. John fell asleep at his piano for the second half of the show, too.

Snoop's half-court game

How did it take us until 2014 to get this guy on the court on Friday night? 6'4" with a sweet stroke and an effective, never-in-a-hurry mid-range game--if you had to guess, between he and Bruce Bowen, which had actually played a decade in the league and won three championships, the answer wouldn't have been super-obvious from this game.

Honda's Presidents' Day Commercial

Loved this last year. Loved it even more this year. Here's hoping it becomes a holiday perennial, like the super-ridiculous (and soon-to-be horiffically dated) Presidents' Day equivalent of that M&Ms/Santa  "THEY DOOOOOO EXIST!!" Christmas commercial.

AD, All Weekend

Easy brilliance in both the Rookie-Sophomore and All-Star games, like a guy who belonged and wasn't nervous about proving it. Criminal that this guy only got ten minutes in the ASG proper on his own home court last night. Even DeMar DeRozan got 15.

The BBVA dude dropping Andre Drummond's Rookie-Sophomore trophy

With Tim Hardaway Jr. providing the real-life hashtag, as if he hadn't already contributed enough to the night's proceedings.

Chuck ragging on the Pistons

Great as Drummond was with his 30 points and 25 rebounds--and he should probably get his own entry here, but it just felt like watching an average night of Andre Drummond being awesome, which is more of a credit to him than anything--it was still a mixed Friday night for Detroit Pistons fans, who had to listen to Charles Barkley's post-game comments belittling the Pistons for wasting Drummond's considerable talents this regular season.

Quoth the Chuckster: "He’s a terrific player who’s playing with those other idiots up in Detroit. And they’re not going to win...They’ve got some idiots on that team. They’ve got some talented players who are not going to ever get it." Not totally fair, perhaps, but definitely feeling closer to true than not these days. Hell, maybe Pistons fans are relieved to have their own frustrations voiced so eloquently by a prominent member of the media.

Oh yeah, and Barkley interviewed the leader of the free world as well. That was cool.

Blake Griffin's first quarter

18 points, basically all on typically high-flying dunks. Should probably be rated higher, but...c'mon East, would it kill us to send a body or two back in transition? Just because we're All-Stars doesn't make us saps.

"Sick is sick."

Dr. J's comments about the previously mentioned Paul George funk dunk. And he would know.

50%

Kobe Bryant's mid-game interview

Good to have Kobe in the building and a part of the festivities over which he now feels like the Godfather, talking about rivalries and history and Reggie Miller being a dick and such, but as my roommate pointed out, do they need to show the Black Mamba's face in a split-screen the entire time, to the distraction of the obviously incredible game action going on behind him? Pretty sure we know what the dude looks like after 18 years, and some of us out there still have crappy tube TVs that are hard to make out blurry figures on, MAYBE.

Marco Belinelli, Three-Point Shootout Champ

My general rule in trying to predict these things is that the winner is usually the guy whose victory makes for the least-interesting story. That probably should have been Arron Afflalo this year, but Belinelli would have been a close second. The one saving grace here was how actively Belinelli was rooting against Beal in his final go-rounds, which most of the shootout contestants are usually too milquetoast to allow themselves to be seen doing.

Kevin Durant, indistinguishable from the regular season

It's funny when an All-Star like Durant gets to 28 points midway through the third quarter of the game against minimal defensive effort, and it looks exactly like every other non-exhibition game he's played in the last couple months. With Durant, he makes the shots or he doesn't, but the level of motivation for the opposition to actively stop him has now officially become irrelevant. That's a little bit terrifying.

40%

Kyrie Irving, All-Star MVP

Not that Kyrie didn't deserve the trophy for his 31-point, 14-assist performance, but it felt a little weird that a guy who's been such a relative no-show this season should win top honors on this night of nights for the NBA's elite. Between Kyrie last night and Dion on Friday, you'd think the Cavs' future was actually as bright as it seemed this year before everything got blown all to hell.

Format of the Skills Challenge

The Skills Challenge is only so captivating to begin with, to further complicate the rules and pointlessly make it a tag-team affair spreads interest a little too thin. If you insist on pairing off the contestants, maybe next year at least have them do it as a three-legged race.

Aloe Blacc, singing in the wrong key

Hey, if it means we can finally put a stop to "The Man" before Aloe Blacc becomes this year's Macklemore at sporting events and award shows, I'm all for it.

30%

Format of the Shooting Stars competition

It's an issue I have every year, but why even bother having the shots from the wing and three-point line when clearly the only thing that really matters for your team is how long it takes you to hit the half-court shot? It's the same problem I have with the early rounds of Family Feud.

Jon Barry on the All-Star Celebrity Game call

Sure, let's have ESPN's most humorless and sanctimonious color man providing commentary every year for the silliest two hours of the NBA season. Normally, he just generally shows contempt for the event and makes sad attempts to smack-talk with the more famous celebrities, but this year he also threw in some creepy comments about wanting to see Victoria's Secret model Erin Hetherington strip (as opposed to Kevin Hart--fair enough, but still). If you're going to go that direction with the announcer tandem, may as well go the whole way with it get, Dave Pasch and Bill Walton and have the entire even be a contentious, confusing and thoroughly rambling mess.

No Russell Westbrook?

Yeah, he was injured and wasn't going to play in anything, but to not have him be a part of the weekend at all--especially when his past and present OKC bros Kevin Durant and James Harden were such a presence all weekend, even biting his style of dress just a tad--felt a little bit strange. Get well soon, Russ.

20%

Jason Derulo's two-part Sunday night gig

As if to prove that they hadn't completely lost touch with being completely out of touch, Kendrick Lamar only got shown doing two songs on Saturday night, but the entire Jason Derulo career retrospective was televised yesterday in the pre-game concert, complete with a raving Terrance J acting like he had just seen the reincarnation of 1983 Michael Jackson on stage, before he got a second cut-in to perform his mediocre current top five hit "Talk Dirty." There's a reason why nobody's heard "In My Head" in the last four years, I hope you guys realize.

Formatting of the dunk contest

Everyone's complained about this already, and justifiably so, so I won't pile on, except to say this: The dunk contest is most brilliant at its simplest. Just get the best guys available out there and let them dunk, and everyone will be happy forever.

10%

The anti-climactic All-Star ending

I can't remember the last All-Star Game that ended so much like the great majority of actual basketball games end--undramatically, without suspense or flair, and with the least-important guys making the deciding plays. We couldn't even sustain any kind of long-promised Durant vs. LeBron showdown feeling for more than a possession at a time. Like this year's Super Bowl, I guess we were just overdue for a clunker.

Kevin Hart's All-Star Celebrity Game dominance

The only good thing for me about Kevin Hart's recent run of incredible commercial success is the hope that eventually it means he'll be too famous to keep presiding over the All-Star Celebrity Game, which is about a year or two away from being named after the pint-sized irritant. Yeah, yeah, it's just the All-Star Celebrity Game, but I love the All-Star Celebrity Game, dammit! Is it so much to ask that I be able to enjoy Stan Verrett and Wale going at it without having to listen to the endless faux-rhapsodizing about whether or not Hart will be able to threepeat as the game's MVP? Whatever happened to the good old days of Michael Rappaport vs. Terrell Owens showdowns, anyway?

C'mon, Kevin, you don't need this anymore. You're a big film star now, you're too big to be spending your Friday nights clowning with Stuart Scott and Skylar Diggins. Go buy an island somewhere. 

Joe Johnson barely getting to the final rack of the Three-Point Shootout

Oh, Joe. You don't have to make it so easy for us, you know. 

0%

Harrison Barnes

It's not just that he was lousy in the Rookie-Sophomore game and that he put up maybe the worst Dunk Contest performance since Gerald Wallace--in Tom Ziller's rankings of the 21 dunks on the night for SB Nation, Barnes had each of the lowest five, and rightly so--it was that he had basically done nothing this year to prove that he was a worthy inclusion in either event. Because of one good dunk over Nikola Pekovic and a couple nice games in the 2013 playoffs, we've somehow been brainwashed into thinking that Barnes is this really good, really exciting young talent, when really the overwhelming evidence points towards him rating out about as pedestrian as possible. The sooner we all realize this--Mark Jackson especially--the better the NBA will be for it.

Mount Rushmore talk

Some years from now, younger NBA fans will catch the All-Star Game or Slam Dunk Contest from this year on NBA TV and wonder why there was so much talk about everyone choosing their "basketball Mount Rushmore." And to those fans, I will explain by saying that this really made no sense at the time, either. In the history of the media obsessing over throwaway LeBron James comments--and it is indeed a long, rich and varied history--never has so much been made out of such nothing a discussion over LeBron's minimally thought out and utterly inconsequential naming of Four Great Players Who Were Great that one time.

Kudos to Kobe, at least, for making the obvious point during his halftime interview that talking about snubs on a list of all-time great players that only goes a quartet deep is thoroughly absurd (but what about Alex English?? ISN'T ANYONE GOING TO MENTION DAVE DEBUSSCHERE????), and hopefully that'll be the end of it. But man, for us to abuse the Mount Rushmore metaphor like this--on Presidents' Day weekend, no less--was pretty shameful. At least there were enough players to field a five-man lineup in those dumb '92 Dream Team vs. '12 Re-Redeem Team debates.