League, Players Union Will Beg For Effort In Sunday's 2025 NBA All-Star Game

NBA insider Chris Haynes reported Friday that the Association and NBPA (player's union) will meet with players Sunday before the 2025 NBA All-Star Game to encourage the "importance of competing and putting on a show for the fans". Even though these discussions happen annually pre-All-Star Game, the NBA is for real this time since the format has changed this year. 

First of all, the NBA All-Star game has turned into such a joke that I, a lifelong fan who watches more NBA basketball than 99.9 percent of the world, forgot the format changed. I mean, why would I or anyone care? As Haynes says, there is a "heightened scrutiny of how players seem uninterested on All-Star Sundays". Haynes can erase "seem" from that sentence. 

After last year's 211-186 clown show, which looked like a bad LA Fitness game, NBA commissioner Adam Silver changed the All-Star game again to a four-team mini-tournament. The Association returned to an "East vs. West" format last year following six years of two captains (aka LeBron James vs. another All-Star) drafting their teams.

This season, TNT broadcasters Kenny Smith, Shaquille O'Neal, and Charles Barkley will draft squads, and Team Candace [Parker] gets whoever wins the Rising Stars Challenge Saturday. There will be three first-to-40-point games Sunday at the Chase Center in San Francisco, with the semifinal winners meeting in a championship game. 

As a point of order (not that anyone should care), players on the winning team get $125,000 a piece, the second-place team takes home $50,000 per player, and the other two teams collect $25,000 each. It's gross that players, most of whom make more than $30 million per year, need to be financially incentivized to give a sh*t about the NBA All-Star game in