ORLANDO, Fla. — There was a time when All-Star Saturday night was the most exciting night of All-Star weekend and the Slam Dunk contest was the premiere event of the evening.
But those days are gone, and if Saturday's shameful production at the Amway Center is any indication of things to come, they may never make a return — which might be best for everyone involved.
All-Star Saturday Night has outlived its usefulness and overstayed its welcome, and it's time for it to go. After this year's debacle, the decision must be made that the event can no longer exist its current form, and until the league addresses the glaring problems and gives fans and players a reason to care, the downward spiral will only continue.
This year's production had everything you never wanted in an All-Star weekend event. A staggeringly unimpressive collection of no-name players. An apathetic, half-full crowd. Sky-high ticket prices and a litany of cringe-worthy gimmicks.
It was the perfect storm of awful circumstances, and the end result was disappointingly predictable.
The event was doomed from the start, when the half-empty crowd couldn't even find the energy to groan as players from four teams — including a mostly hometown team comprised of Jameer Nelson (current Magic guard), Dennis Scott (former Magic star) and WNBA star Marie Ferdinand-Harris — clunked their way through the Shooting Stars competition.
During the Skills Challenge, the players didn't even feign interest and participated with a wave of ennui that was personified by Cleveland Cavaliers rookie Kyrie Irving, who listlessly loafed through the course, posting a 42.2-second time that was nearly 9 seconds slower than his closest competitor.
Kevin Love won the 3-Point Contest, becoming only the second power forward to ever take home the trophy. But hometown shooter Ryan Anderson was a dud, and none of the shooters blew anyone away. Just one player over the course of three rounds — Heat guard James Jones — went on a run of five straight makes.
But the real tragedy of the night was the Dunk Contest, an abomination of an event that the league and its players should be ashamed of.
The video intro that opened into the contest was more exciting than the contest itself, but it was downright disrespectful to Vince Carter, Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins, Dwight Howard and others to show their famous dunks on the Amway Center's giant video board when you consider the travesty that followed.
The contest — which was damned from the moment Chase Budinger, Jeremy Evans, Paul George and Derrick Williams were announced as contestants — was lacking in star power, so it took the gimmick route to try to generate interest and failed miserably.
The night's first dunk featured Houston Rockets no-name Budinger — who was dressed as Woody Harrelson's character in the movie "White Men Can't Jump" — leaping over rap mogul P. Diddy. Evans' first slam was performed with a tiny camera on his face, which was mildly inventive, but also unimpressive.
George tried jumping over Indiana Pacers teammates Roy Hibbert and Dahntay Jones, but unfortunately he wasn't tall enough to clear the 7-foot-2 Hibbert on the first two tries, and only was able to complete the dunk with a little help from Hibbert's shoulders on the third.
Williams came out on the back of a motorcycle driven by the Minnesota Timberwolves mascot, then dunked over the motorcycle — but he, too, took three attempts to flush the ball home, a precursor to a second round that left everything to be desired.
Budinger kicked off Round 2 with a basic windmill that players like LeBron James can do in their sleep, and George busted out some blacklights and a glow-in-the-dark jersey before throwing down what might have been an impressive 360 windmill.
Unfortunately, you could hardly even see George as he performed the dunk, so there's no way to know for sure.
Evans performed the only truly impressive dunk of the night when he took an alley-oop and dunked home two balls while jumping over Jazz teammate Gordon Hayward. But his third dunk lost him any respect points he earned with his second, as he slipped on a Karl "Mailman" Malone jersey and dunked over vertically challenged comedian Kevin Hart, who was dressed like a mail carrier.
George tried a sticker dunk for his final act — a la Dwight Howard in Las Vegas in 2007 — slapping an image of Larry Bird's face against the backboard. And Budinger, wearing a Cedric Ceballos throwback, recreated Ceballos' famous "hocus pocus" dunk from the 1992 dunk contest — the last time it was held in Orlando.
Overall, the evening made most of the fans in attendance wish they had been the ones who were blindfolded.
All-Star Saturday Night was an epic failure — as bad as it's ever been. But that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
The first thing the NBA has to do to get back in the fans' good graces is get the league's superstars involved, because right now All-Star Saturday Night is quickly becoming No-Star Saturday Night.
Just one bona fide superstar participated in the night's two premier events — the 3-point contest and dunk contest — and that player, Kevin Durant, was only in the 3-point shootout as a last-minute fill-in for injured Atlanta Hawks guard Joe Johnson.
The league's best players owe it to the spectators to lace up, and it's a slap in the face to the league's fans for them to sit on the sidelines. It's the continued support of the NBA's fans that allows these men to play the game they love and make a king's ransom doing it. It's the least they can do, as a nod to their loyal followers, to show up, shut up and play.
They also need to make it a more fan-friendly experience. Exorbitant ticket prices at Saturday night's show essentially priced the average fan out of the event, and as a result, huge patches of seats went unfilled. Empty seats are a bad look and lead to the types of uninspired performances that we saw this year.
The empty chair-backs aren't really Orlando's fault, though. The event's infrastructure is flawed and sets the city up for failure. Saturday night couldn't have gone worse for the Magic and the city, and it's a shame that there was nothing they could do about it.
If the NBA really wants to rejuvenate these events, they should take a peek at the NHL. They do All-Star Weekend right, with skill events ranging from the fastest skater to the hardest shot and league superstars participating in all of them.
Major League Baseball knows what it's doing too — at least when it comes to the non-game events — and the Home Run Derby is one of the most entertaining and beloved All-Star events in sports.
But the NBA is backtracking, and before long All-Star Weekend as a whole will be lumped in a group with the NFL's Pro Bowl — the most embarrassing "All-Star" event in sports.
NBA All-Star Saturday Night may be a cash cow for the league, with companies like Haier, Taco Bell, Foot Locker and Sprite footing the bill, but it's simply not interesting, not winning over fans and not helping the game grow.
The league can do better.
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