Stephon Castle was All-Star Weekend’s big winner
While his teammates caused a controversy, Castle introduced himself to a larger audience.
Do you think the Rising Stars winner belongs on All-Star Sunday?
Marilyn Dubinski: I didn’t have a problem with it since they needed a fourth team, and unless this tournament format is here to stay (I bet it’s not), there isn’t any reason to widen the All-Star selection pool (especially since, in some cases, it can have implications on how much a max contract is worth — whether it should or not is a story for another day). My hope (and probably Adam Silver’s) was that the Rising Stars winners would play stronger in the All-Star game and motivate the other teams, who would hate to be embarrassed by them, but it didn’t really work out that way.
Mark Barrington: Does anyone belong on this shambolic display of non-basketball festivities? It’s clearly just light entertainment, and I think it’s cool that the young guys were able to compete for a shot to take on a team of real All-Stars. It gave the casual fans a chance to see up-and-coming stars and a few guys who will be on the other team in a year or two. In their game against actual All-Stars, the Rising Stars acquitted themselves pretty well and the OGs had to depend on a nuclear shooting display from Steph Curry to put them away. If Steph didn’t have a flashback to his performance with Team USA in the Olympics, the Rising Stars could have had a real shot at making the finals, which is a good motivator to the teams that are going to face them in the future if the league ends up keeping this format. I liked it and I think it added a lot to the games on Sunday.
Was the All-Star tournament great? No, but it was still a big improvement over the recent years where it was a really boring slog to watch two disinterested teams go through the motions. All-Star games are never going to be peak-level competitions, but at least there was a bit of competitive spirit in the games on Sunday. I think they can improve it by decreasing the dead time between games and having less filler material, but this was a step in the right direction. Hopefully they can bring it back next year with some streamlining and make it even better.
Jesus Gomez: I don’t think so. I feel like the format was needlessly complicated and created a situation where playing on Sunday felt devalued. There’s a very good case to make for past and present All-Stars devaluing the honor themselves by not taking the game seriously and forcing the league office to come up with something new, so no one’s blameless here. It’s also not a huge deal and, just like Marilyn, I don’t expect it to last, so there’s no need to get riled up about it, but if the idea of All-Star Sunday is to showcase the NBA’s top talent, then that’s what should happen.
J.R. Wilco: I’d like to make the case that past and present All-Stars have devalued the honor of being named All-Stars by not taking the games seriously and forcing the league office to come up with something new, but that will have to wait for another time. I wish that the reality of All-Star Sunday could be to showcase the NBA’s top talent, but it’s been years and years since that’s been the case … but the world keeps spinning, everything changes, and maybe it’ll take the league’s best player playing to win in order to reset the culture the league’s best have established as a norm for the ASB. In which case, Victor’s ascendance can’t come fast enough.
Stephon Castle won MVP of the Rising Stars game, came second in the Dunk Contest and was a part of the All-Star Game. Has his performance in the All-Star Weekend made him a household name among the league’s young players?
Dubinski: I think it did. He got universal praise as the most intriguing player in Rising Stars throughout the broadcast, and in a way he seemed to bring some new appreciation to the Dunk Contest in the sense that people appreciated his raw skill and athletic ability while bringing into question Mac McClung’s use of props and gimmicks. Castle’s performance even had some NBA stars considering coming back to the dunk contest. Overall, he was certainly one of the winners of All-Star weekend and put his name on the map.
Barrington: I think he’s the front-runner for Rookie of the Year, and the Rising Stars and his appearance on Sunday in the All-Star tournament cemented that for casual NBA fans who don’t necessarily watch the Spurs play. It seems like he was front and center in a lot of the pregame and postgame (or post-event in the dunk competition) interviews on the TNT broadcast, so having a lot of face time in front of the cameras can’t hurt.
Gomez: I think so. This rookie class is bad, so there has not been a lot of hype about it. Other young guys like Amen Thompson, Dereck Lively II and obviously Wemby have deservedly gotten a lot of attention as future stars while Castle has shown plenty of flashes but is still a bench player putting unimpressive numbers on a mediocre Spurs team, so it’s hard to be too upset at him being somewhat overlooked as a talent. All-Star Weekend provided an opportunity to make a name for himself and join the group of exciting young players most NBA fans know about, and he made the most of it.
Wilco: I don’t know that I’d say that he’s made his name a household one, but I think he’s positioned himself head-and-shoulders above the rest of the candidates for ROY, and if he wins it, then he becomes a household name then by default. So, I’ll say that even if he didn’t, the took a massive step toward it, which is good enough for me.
Chris Paul and Victor Wembanyama were DQ’d from the Skills Challenge for trying to game the system. Injustice or deserved punishment?
Dubinski: From everything I’ve heard, it sounds like an injustice. Draymond Green claims he heard them asking officials if their approach of just tossing the balls toward the basket (as opposed to actually shooting) was legal, and they were told it was. In other words, they had the green light before officials actually saw it and changed their minds. Don’t punish players for exploiting a loophole in which the rules say nothing about how to shoot the ball and there’s no reward for making the shots; instead, close the loophole going forward.
Barrington: I think it was a communication failure from the league, at least from what I know about what happened. The Spurs asked about their strategy before they executed it, and were told it was OK. I think when the crowd erupted in boos, the NBA realized that they couldn’t allow the rule exploit to stand, especially when the Spurs were the first to go, because it would have meant that all of the other teams would have had to adopt the same strategy, which would have made the crowd pretty unhappy.
I don’t mind that Wembanyama and Paul got disqualified, but in my mind, they satisfied the letter of the law, because the idea of a legitimate shot is a matter of interpretation. Any of those shots could have counted as an attempt if the player were fouled. I think that Wemby and Paul miscalculated how the crowd would react, but that wasn’t their job. It would have been easy for the league to write the rules to close the exploit, but mostly they were concerned about teams taking too long to hit a shot and not being able to air commercials on time, so they wrote the rules so that hitting shots wasn’t part of the competition. The league needs to do a better job of making the rules for a fair competition, and that’s not the players’ job to fix.
In the final analysis, this ‘controversy’ is about as significant as … well I can’t think of anything more insignificant than this. It made the whole thing a lot more entertaining and interesting than if it hadn’t happened, so I congratulate Chris Paul and Victor.
Gomez: Deserved. Why would you try to gain an advantage in a silly competition that is supposed to be fun? It doesn’t matter to me that the rules might have not been clear. If your first instinct is to try to find a loophole, that to me says less about your competitive nature and more about a desire to be perceived as the smartest guy in the room. It’s not a big deal, and if officials cleared it earlier and then went back on their word, they should have let them run the course again instead of disqualifying them. But I can’t say I feel bad for Wemby and Paul.
Wilco: Deserved. If you’re going to game the system, go ahead. But don’t make a mockery of a competition that’s practically already mocking itself. If you think you’ve found a loophole, exploit it, but do so in a way that’s impossible to disqualify. How much more time would it really have taken to at least aim for the basket on those shots while shooting them as rapidly as possible? If you’re not watching the ball after you shoot it, my guess is you could have all three in the air at the same time before the first hits the backboard or rim. That would have been plenty quick enough to win. I think the idea was fun, but the execution was off and that’s why they were DQ’d. But the bottom line is that everyone wins because what’s historically been the worst and goofiest event of the weekend got a TON of press. I hope Wemby can go for it again next year.
