Another NBA weekend is over. The kaleidoscope of events ranged from Shaquille Neal's party at Hugh Hefner's mansion to NBA players distributing food to the needy. Once again, the NBA proved its unparalleled ability to market itself and tap into a contemporary culture of youth and glamour.
But what happens when the marketing of the game and its commercialism begin to spill over into the game itself? We may have had a glimpse of an answer this weekend.
The league's hottest young stars, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, sat out an All-Star Game they should have been in and played in a Rookie Challenge game that became a travesty on Friday night.
All-star games are tricky affairs, showcasing individual skills and, ideally, fostering good, injury-free competition at midseason.
Sunday night's well-played, hotly contested All-Star Game was a much-needed contrast to the rookie game, unprecedented in its lack of effort or competitive fire. To the extent that everything is a learning moment, the first- and second-year players could have learned a thing or two from watching the veterans play an All-Star Game that offered a balance of entertainment and competition.
For all the talk about the NBA's youth movement, the games Friday and Sunday night showed the chasm between the players still finding their way and the veteran players who compete in every context.
"I didn't really enjoy the game," Dave Bing, a seven-time All-Star in the 1960s and 1970s, said in an interview here on Sunday. "The game has become too much of a show for me. As a purist and a former player, it's not as competitive as I think it should be. I know they're trying to capture that market, but they can ruin the game, they can ruin the product at the same time. Everything now is about athleticism -- how high can you jump. Everything is a dunk. You just don't see the pure part of them."
On the other hand, a lot of people are benefiting from marketing initiatives that have made the NBA one of the world's premier sports leagues. The Retired Players Association, the Read to Achieve Program and other outreach programs that the NBA operates flourish because of lucrative corporate sponsorships.
Marketing has taken the league to its current level of global exposure, but it has created a confusing divide between endorsement and worth.
"I just think the league is going to have to really stress and put some focus back on the game and not as much on entertainment," Bing said. "I know that it's a business, they're competing against all other venues and so they don't want to lose that market out there right now. They're trying to get that 15- to 30-year-old market so they can have them for a long period of time. But at some point they've got to get back to the product, which is the game."
The Rookie Challenge premise is also good: Second-year players have a chance to show the new kids how it's done. But, without direction from the league, the game can become a dunking exhibition disguised as a game, as it did Friday night. And dunking is not the most attractive thing about James or Anthony.
Bing believes as I do, that James and Anthony should have been in Sunday night's game. Instead, after playing at a major league level for three months, they were relegated for a night to the minors. They sold tickets, but the game was not what it could have been.
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