5 ways to fix NBA All-Star Weekend after widely panned 2025 event

It takes a lot to get a near-unanimous opinion on any sports matter these days, but the 2025 NBA All-Star Weekend achieved that.

The festivities in the Bay Area were panned across the board, with almost everyone disliking the tournament-style All-Star Game and some of the events on All-Star Saturday. In fact, Draymond Green, who was a part of TNT's coverage for Sunday's game, called the format "ridiculous," adding that it was a "zero" out of 10 on the excitement scale.

So yeah, it's time for NBA commissioner Adam Silver to get back in the lab and tinker around with not just the All-Star Game, but the contests leading up to it. Luckily for him, we've got five ideas to revamp the whole weekend.

This one is mostly aimed at the Slam Dunk Contest, as the Skills Challenge and 3-Point Contest regularly have multiple All-Stars compete in each event. In recent years, though, the Slam Dunk Contest has been filled with players who can't even crack their respective team's rotations, with the likes of Mac McClung, Jacob Toppin, Kenyon Martin Jr., Cassius Stanley and Hamidou Diallo having participated.

This year, Boston Celtics wing Jaylen Brown was the only contestant who also played in the All-Star Game on that same weekend.

[Related: Four questions after the NBA's latest attempt at reviving All-Star Sunday night ]

Suffice to say, there's just no star power in the Slam Dunk Contest, at least not to the level there was in the 1980s-2000s. Nowadays, the league office would have to incentivize All-Stars to want to take part in the Slam Dunk Contest, but they could get creative. Maybe they could mandate that to play in an All-Star Game, you have to have participated in at least one All-Star Saturday event at some point in your