Like many other professional sports, the NBA has had an All-Star Game problem for a while. Many attempts have been made by the league to reinvigorate the once-great event, but as of now, no solution has been found.
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We’ll see if the new USA vs. the world concept can do the trick when it debuts this weekend. But given the fact that the best players in the world haven’t been motivated to try much in other formats in recent years, there’s not exactly a lot of optimism among fans that this will be any different.
Tracy McGrady is a Hall-of-Famer and a seven-time All-Star himself, and on the most recent episode of his new Cousins podcast with his real-life cousin and eight-time All-Star Vince Carter, he made a suggestion that he hoped could save the All-Star Game.
“When you talk about the All-Star Game and how we’re trying to get the competitive spirit back in that, add incentives, bro,” he said.
“On my AAU team, I give my kids $100 if they took a charge on my AAU team. So in the All-Star Game, if you’re taking charges, there should be incentives, whether it’s money or whatever,” McGrady suggested.
Carter appreciated the spirit behind his cousin’s comment, but he jumped in to say that encouraging guys to take charges in the All-Star Game is “a little extreme.”
He’s right of course, because there aren’t that many charges being taken in a regular season NBA game, so there’s no hope at all that guys will suddenly start putting their bodies on the line against an elite athlete on a freight train to the basket in the All-Star Game.
They then circled back to getting deflections and making stops as a more reasonable thing that could be rewarded, though the logistics of how that would work remained hazy. McGrady’s heart is in a good place, though, because he sees NBA players as role models who need to take their responsibility to the younger generation seriously.
“I’m looking at it from just an educational standpoint,” he said, “because as a platform we’re trying to get these guys to compete, right? We want them to compete. Add incentives, deflections, charges.”
McGrady laughed at himself for suggesting charges should be encouraged, but then he doubled down on the idea. “As a young player that loves watching the All-Star Game, and seeing these guys take charges, a part of me thinks that’s pretty cool that NBA All-Stars are taking charges, or competing on the defensive end,” he said.
There are two big issues with McGrady’s idea, besides the obvious one that nobody is going to be taking a charge in the All-Star Game. The first is that the players make so much money now that there’s really no way to incentivize them to try harder. You could give every player on the winning team $5 million and it probably wouldn’t make much difference since most of them are making $50 million per year anyway.
The other issue is that today’s players grew up watching T-Mac and Carter, Jordan and Kobe. They had the positive role models that competed their behinds off in the All-Star Game, and it doesn’t seem to have influenced them in the slightest since they can’t be bothered now to do it themselves.
T-Mac is a former player who made millions of dollars in his career, so handing out $100 to any kid who takes a charge is no sweat for him. What are those kids going to do when they join a new team and the coach isn’t able to open his wallet?
At the end of the day, athletes need to decide on their own whether it’s worth it for them to try in the All-Star Game. They can’t be forced into it. If that means the All-Star Game needs to go the way of the Pro Bowl and all but disappear, then maybe that’s what needs to happen. If someone like Victor Wembanyama can come along and force a culture shift in which everyone now wants to compete, even better.
