By CJ Carlson
The NBA All-Star game has come and went, with the Eastern Conference taking down the Western Conference by an insane score of 211-186. It was the first time in history that a team has been able to surpass the 200-point mark, in any game. The closest came in 2016 when the Western Conference put up 196 back in 2016.
Western Conference Had A Few Bright Spots
Let’s talk about what we saw from both teams, starting with the Western Conference. The youngster Shai Gilgeous-Alexander shot the lights out and led the starters with 31 points. The rest of the starters saw Kevin Durant score 18, LeBron James score 8, Nikola Jokic score 13, and Luka Doncic score 7. Simply put, the rest of the starters just didn’t do all that much offensively, and it led to some of their reserves having huge nights. Among those big nights came a ridiculously great game from Karl-Anthony Towns.
The Minnesota Timberwolves center scored 50 points and hit 23 of his 35 shot attempts. To put that into perspective, nobody else on the team took more than 16 shot attempts. Steph Curry had 16 and Devin Booker had 15, but the rest of the reserves didn’t get many shots. Anthony Davis had 6, Paul George had 13, Kawhi Leonard had 5, and Anthony Edwards had 4.
The Eastern Conference Broke Records At The All-Star Game
Flipping over to the East now, they were more evenly split, with their starters really coming to play early on. Damian Lillard led the way in scoring with 39 points with the starters, but he wasn’t the only one to shoot efficiently. When it comes to the remainder of the starters, Tyrese Haliburton scored 32, Giannis Antetokounmpo had 23, Jayson Tatum had 20, and Bam Adebayo scored 3. Yes, one of those doesn’t feel like they belong, though Adebayo took just two shot attempts, one of those coming after he trolled Jokic on an inbounds pass. Other than that, he took a back seat to the rest of the team.
When it comes to their reserves, they were evenly split out similar to the West. Scottie Barnes had 16, Jalen Brunson had 12, Tyrese Maxey had 10, Donovan Mitchell had 9, Paolo Banchero had 6, and Trae Young had five. Oh, but we can’t forget, reserve Jaylen Brown had a whopping 36 off the bench for the East. Last year, Brown took a good chunk of shots during the All-Star game, and this wasn’t any different. He took 23 attempts, the second most on the team trailing only Lillard.
All-Star Game MVP
Votes were coming in throughout the game for the All-Star game MVP award, and Lillard was able to win it by the time the clock struck zero. Lillard scored 39 points and racked up six assists on great efficiency to lock down the award, though the crowd didn’t hesitate to rain boos on him because their hometown star Tyrese Haliburton wasn’t able to win it. After all, the game was played in Indiana, and Haliburton is on the Pacers.
The Game Didn’t Go Over Well With Fans
It should be noted that the game just wasn’t a great success though. This weekend, NBA commissioner Adam Silver mentioned that they were changing away from the 24-point target score in the fourth quarter because he didn’t think it was working when it came to the competitiveness of the game. He was hoping that bringing it back to a normal four-quarter game would spice things up again. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Not only could you tell that there was a lack of effort with the final score, but watching the game only exemplified that.
You could easily see neither team was trying, and Doncic even heaved up a full court shot randomly with about a minute left in the first half. The effort wasn’t there, and some players probably didn’t really care about how the game went. The fans aren’t going to be happy about the All-Star game once more, and the league will need to think of ways to fix it. Ultimately, they might not be able to when considering the circumstances.
