Two days from now Team USA plays Team Canada in the finale of the 4 Nations Face-Off, the best idea the NHL's had since making goalies wear masks. It cut down on the league's stitch count, for one thing, and who needed to see Gump Worsley's Gump-ish mug, anyway?
(This is not to single out poor Gump, mind you. No one was tuning in to gaze upon Glenn Hall's face or Rogie Vachon's or Bernie Parent's, either. And they certainly weren't all excited to see Terry Sawchuck's famously stitch-o-matic visage.)
Anyway, the 4 Nations' final is going to be appointment viewing like nothing else currently on the dead February docket, and if that is a rare victory for NHL commish Gary Bettman -- think blind squirrels and acorns and you've got the gist -- it also illuminates, in the most glaring way possible, the mess that was the NBA All-Star Game or Mini-Tournament or whatever the hell that was last weekend.
I didn't watch a second of it, but many of those who did apparently are still trying figure out what they saw. It was a Rising Stars first-to-40 tournament, and then the past-their-expiration dates 3-Point and Slam Dunk contests, and then some Rising Stars vs. Kenny's Young Stars vs. Chuck's Global Stars vs. Shaq's OGs first-to-40 action. Somewhere in there Kevin Hart appeared for some reason no one's yet been able to decipher.
The end result was a sort of variety show/playground ball mash-up, a steaming pile lowlighted by the OG of OGs, LeBron James, announcing at the last minute he wouldn't be participating on account of a foot boo-boo. That got things off to a rollicking start, and now NBA commissioner Adam Silver and his cohorts are no doubt in red-line panic mode. How to save this off-off-Broadway farce?
The Blob has some ideas. And they start with a fix the NBA already has in place.
That would be the NBA's in-season tournament, which, unlike the current All-Star festivities, the players have actually embraced and seem to care about. So why not steal a page from the NHL's playbook and replace the All-Star Game/Games/Whatever It Is with that?
The early-season timing of the in-season tourney has always been bizarre, except that Silver and Co. apparently figured it would get someone paying attention to the NBA at a time when no one's paying attention to the NBA. Maybe so, but it's wasted there. Why not move it to mid-February?
You could steal a page from the NHL and divide it into a Team USA, Team Americas, Team Europe and Team World round robin. Take ten days or so off to play it, with the two survivors squaring off in the final on what used to be All-Star Game weekend.
Or how about this: Steal a page from Major League Baseball and put together two Eastern Conference teams and two Western Conference teams. Play the semis one weekend; the survivors play an East-vs.-West final the next weekend. The winning team secures homecourt in the NBA Finals for its conference; the winning team's players get the lion's share of a 70-30 split of all ad revenue and TV money from the Finals.
I don't know about you, but I think either of the aforementioned scenarios might perk up a few attention spans. They'd make the All-Star Game about the game again. And the participants might actually try, or at least appear to.
Heck. LeBron might even play this time.
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