The NBA Spent Just 3 Days In Indianapolis For The All Star Weekend And Then Immediately Changed The Host City Requirements For Future Events

Stacy Revere. Getty Images.

At this point I think most would agree that the NBA's All Star Weekend is on a bit of life support at the moment. For years now fans, talking heads, basically anyone with eyes who has tuned into this thing have talked about how the entire weekened needs a revamp. What that ends up being is anyone's guess, whether that's a change in events, changing the stakes of the games, or offering more money, one thing is clear. 

When you have legends of the league going to the players and begging them to try hard only for them to do the exact opposite

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it's pretty clear this is a cooked product as it stands today. 

Perhaps the funniest part of this whole saga is the fact that the NBA spent 3 days in Indy for this event, the on court product was a disaster for the most part, so instead of making real changes the NBA decides you know what? Small markets are OUT from now on

Something like this would knock out cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Sacramento, and Oklahoma City among others, and it's pretty obvious what probably happened here. 

The NBA: "OK guys, please try hard during All Star Weekend, we're getting crushed"

The Players: "Eh, no thanks"

The NBA: "Fine, what can we do to make you care and actually try? We're not paying you more money"

The Players: "Fine, only hold the All Star Weekend in cities we like to party in"

In recent years, we've seen this event go from Salt Lake to Cleveland to now Indy. I'm not sure how the location of an event would then translate to more effort on the court, especially if it's in a warm-weather city with an awesome nightlife that I'm sure the players would absolutely take advantage of. It's probably very likely they all go to bed at a reasonable hour and get their full 8 hours of sleep so they can be fresh and ready to put on a full effort during the fake game. Genius idea Adam!

All that talk from Silver about praising Indy as a host city to then immediately making these new rules so cities like Indy can never have another All Star Weekend is very funny. For a league that already has a "small market problem", this doesn't exactly help things. Fans in those markets already have to deal with constantly hearing about how the best player on their team actually needs to leave and go to LA or NY, and now a chance for a city to show out and maybe show a potential free agent life isn't half bad there is now out the window. 

It just seems like a pretty odd decision to alienate a city/fanbase like this. Especially when some of those smaller markets are turning into the best teams in the league. All that talk about "growing the game" gets a little confusing with a decision like this that seems pretty counterproductive to that.

And the thing is, nothing is going to change in terms of the actual games! Is the idea here that players will be happy being in a fun city and that happiness will translate onto the court? Let me ask Adam Silver this. Does happiness prevent injury? No? Ok well then end of debate. Players aren't going to go hard in these fake games when they are in the middle of their season, especially the best players on the best teams who have aspirations of winning a title. That's going to be true whether the game takes place in Indy, LA, Miami, or NYC.

So really, this is just another tough blow for small markets all throughout the league, and another attempt by Silver to fix something while completely missing the root of the issue in the first place. That's tough.