The NBA All-Star Game served a critical purpose when it was conceived. All the way back in 1951, the basketball world was rocked by point-shaving scandals at the college level. The NBA needed to change the narrative and attract attention to the pro game. They settled on a concept Major League Baseball popularized two decades earlier: an All-Star Game. Boston hosted the first one and drew an enormous crowd of more than 10,000 fans. The All-Star Game was off to the races from there.
The NBA was still several years away from its first television broadcast when that first All-Star Game was played in 1951. That made seeing the league’s best players extraordinarily difficult for all but the most passionate fans. You either caught them when they came through your city or you missed them entirely. The proliferation of television over the next decade made it slightly easier for fans to watch the world’s best basketball players, but it’s not as though you could hop on Twitter and catch the highlights if you missed a big game in the 1960s. The technological limitations of the day made it hard for the league to showcase its best and brightest.
Putting all of them in the same place at the same time addressed that issue. Maybe you can’t see Oscar Robertson and Jerry West every night, but you’ll get them in at least one marquee event per year. The All-Star Game gave fans something they might not otherwise have been able to see.
Basketball became more accessible in the years that followed. The proliferation of highlights meant a great deal. League Pass offered fans the chance to watch every game. Now social media clips those games down into digestible pieces. But the All-Star Game managed to find ways to justify its existence even as its original purpose faded. Yes, you’ve surely heard the bellyaching this week about how competitive these games used to be, but their utility ran deeper. Remember Isiah Thomas’ infamous freeze out of Michael Jordan? Or Magic Johnson’s famous return to the floor in 1992?
Every now and then, an All-Star Game…
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