It’s happening: The U.S. vs. the World is finally a done deal and will be the format for this season’s NBA All-Star Game.
The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association unveiled the long-awaited plan Tuesday night, after months of trying to figure out the latest way to spark renewed interest in the league’s midseason contest.
The game — which really will be a round-robin tournament of games — will be played Sunday, Feb. 15, starting at 5 p.m. Eastern at Intuit Dome, the Los Angeles Clippers’ arena in Inglewood, California. It’ll be aired on NBC at just about the midway point of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, which will also be broadcast on NBC’s family of networks.
And part of what NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and other stakeholders liked about trying the U.S. vs. the World format was how the timing coincides with those Milan Cortina Games and the surge of national pride that people around the world get during an Olympics.
“I think it’s going to be exciting for people to watch,” Milwaukee star Giannis Antetokounmpo said earlier this season when asked about the idea of U.S. vs. the World.
“I’m going to play hard. I’ve always been playing hard, but I think it’s going to put a little bit more juice to the game. … All players have ego. Nobody wants to be embarrassed. Guys will play harder because they don’t want to become — I don’t know how you say this — they don’t want to become viral. I’m excited for this format.”
Players born outside of the U.S. have won each of the last seven MVP awards, each of the last four NBA scoring titles, and each of the last five rebounding titles. Canada’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was MVP, NBA Finals MVP, the league’s scoring champion and led Oklahoma City to the NBA title last season.
What is the format?
While the NBA had made clear for several weeks that U.S. vs. the World was going to happen — it was even talked about at last season All-Star weekend in San Francisco — some elements of the format were a mystery until Tuesday.
There will be three teams of at least eight players. Games will be one standard NBA quarter, or 12 minutes long.
Team A will play Team B in Game 1. The winner of that game will play Team C in Game 2. The loser of Game 1 will play Team C in Game 3.
The teams with the best two records will play in the championship game. If all three teams are 1-1, point differential would be the tiebreaker.
The end result, the NBA hopes, is four standard quarters — the equivalent of a typical game.
How will teams be picked?
Let’s start with the voting. It will be basically the same as it has been in recent years, with one notable tweak — the NBA is eliminating the frontcourt and backcourt position designations for players.
Each ballot from fans will include five players from the Eastern Conference, five players from the Western Conference. Positions will not matter, nor will nationalities. The fan ballots will be used as part of a formula to identify the starters; fan votes will be weighted at 50%, with NBA player voting accounting for 25% and voting from a panel of writers and broadcasters who cover the league making up the final 25%.
From there, 10 “starters” — five East, five West — will be chosen.
The 14 reserves, seven from each conference, will be selected in balloting by the league’s head coaches.
