Last weekend, the NBA hosted its annual All-Star Weekend in San Francisco. The event started on Friday with the Celebrity All-Star Game and the Rising Stars tournament. Saturday highlighted fan-favorite events, including the Skills Challenge, 3-Point Contest and Dunk Contest. The weekend was capped off by the NBA’s 74th annual All-Star Game.
To start the weekend off, the 2025 Skills Challenge featured four NBA duos competing in a relay race, tasked with quickly and accurately completing a set of challenges such as bounce passes and three-point shots. Team Cavaliers, starring Evan Mobley and Donovan Mitchell were crowned champions after defeating the at home Warriors in the finals. Notably, this year’s event’s spotlight was on Team Spurs, featuring Victor Wembanyama and Chris Paul, who started the competition but were disqualified after sporadically throwing up three-point shots without intending to make them, attempting to sacrifice accuracy for time and inciting boos from fans.
Although the NBA canceled the highly anticipated 3-Point Shootout rematch between Steph Curry and the WNBA’s Sabrina Ionescu, this year’s 3-Point Contest was still a thriller. The contest featured many stars, including New York’s Jalen Brunson, Milwaukee’s Damian Lillard and Miami’s Tyler Herro. In the final round, Tyler Herro put up 24 points after knocking down both “Starry” balls, special balls from hard to make spots on the court worth 3 points each. He would have to sit and watch if Cleveland’s Darius Garland or Golden State’s Buddy Hield could break his mark.
Garland could not match Herro’s 24 points, only putting up 19 as he missed three of his five shots on his money ball rack. Hield also started slow but suddenly caught fire in the latter half of the round. He needed to hit all five of his money ball shots but missed on his fourth ball, putting up 23 points, granting Herro the 2025 3-Point Contest champion.
Historically, the Dunk Contest has been a fan favorite. However, fewer stars have participated in the contest in recent years, fearing injury, leaving the contest to lesser-known players who have not lived up to Michael Jordan’s free throw dunk or Aaron Gordon and Zach Levine’s 2016 Dunk Contest frenzy. Similarly, besides two-time defending champion Mac McClung, this year’s participants lacked star-power, featuring Stephon Castle, Andrew Jackson Jr., and Matas Buzelis. McClung is not even an NBA player as he currently plays for the Orlando Magic’s minor league team. Although many expected McClung to claim the title yet again, his dunks still did not disappoint. For example, McClung brought out a car for one of his dunks, a set piece previously used in the Dunk Contest in 2011 by Blake Griffin. This time, McClung outdid even the great Griffin, hurdling the top of the car for a reverse dunk, earning himself a maximum of 50 points from all of the judges. McClung performed three more dunks, all of which earned 50s, including a dunk where he hurdled an individual rotating on a hoverboard, grabbing the propped ball and dunking it simultaneously with another basketball. With McClung’s continuous creativity over the past few years, some credit him for keeping the NBA Dunk Contest afloat.
Recently, the NBA has struggled and received backlash for the non-competitiveness of the All-Star Game. Therefore, the NBA presented a new format for the All-Star Game where it featured a mini-tournament with four teams, each game played to 40 points with no clock. Each team had 8 players, three of which contained All-Star players, and were selected by one of TNT’s NBA analysts to the following teams: Shaq’s OGs, Charles Barkley’s Global Stars and Kenny’s Young Stars. Shaq’s roster, paralleling his name, “OGs,” consisted of many of the veteran stars such as LeBron James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant. Chuck’s team was built around international superstars, including Canada’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, France’s Victor Wembanyama and Serbia’s Nikola Jokic. The fourth team, Team Candace, was the winner of the Rising Stars 4 team mini-tournament on Friday, consisting of top first and second-year NBA players and NBA G League standouts.
The night opened with Chuck’s team defeating Kenny’s 41-32 as Lillard hit the game-winning 3-pointer. Afterward, Shaq’s team squared off against the Rising Stars and dominated, as the Rising Stars did not have the star power and shooting ability of the “OGs.” Finally, Shaq and Chuck’s team faced off for the championship, where Steph Curry put on a show, sinking a one-legged three and a half-court shot, leading the “OGs” to victory while securing All-Star Game MVP.
Although there were sparks of competitiveness throughout the games, the format still did not foster games played at full speed, as the championship game was subpar. With criticisms from the mini-tournament including a team of non-all stars to continuous features of comedy from Kevin Hart that seemed to disrupt the flow of the event, many wonder if the NBA will go back to the drawing board, figuring out another way to make the All-Star Game more exciting for fans.
