KENNY SMITH, BARKLEY, 397 POINTS — WHY EVEN HAVE AN NBA ALL-STAR GAME?
If it was rude and crude for Smith to mock Ionescu or Barkley to take on San Francisco for a homeless plague, what is the point of playing a “showcase” in which no one cares about real basketball?
This was a weekend when Sabrina Ionescu almost beat Steph Curry, the greatest of all basketball shooters, while using her desired rules. Taking aim from the NBA’s three-point line, she lost 29-26 and almost pulled a real-world version of Billie Jean King whipping Bobby Riggs. She was making him sweat in the power of his prime. Here she was, at the All-Star Game, morphing Taylor Swift in the realm of males.
“Absolutely,” Curry said. “I saw the first rack. I think she made the first six. So it added a whole lot of pressure, for sure.”
What a marvelous idea, conceived by two longtime friends. “I wish I could say the league came up with this idea. This was about Steph and Sabrina who said, won't this be fantastic?” commissioner Adam Silver said.
Even though she just missed, Ionescu said, “A night like tonight shows a lot of young girls and boys that, if you can shoot, you can shoot. It doesn’t matter if you’re a girl or a boy. It just matters about the heart you have and wanting to be the best you can be. We're very excited to see kind of what the future has. I think he has a partner in mind that's going to join him. So I'm open to any partner that could help me win and take that belt that he has up front and center away from him.”
The only man who voiced a complaint, on national television, was Kenny Smith. We know him as “The Jet.” Who knew his mouth would speed at such an obnoxious rate? Charles Barkley is the wildass. Shaquille O’Neal mutters. Since when did Smith become a studio dope?
“She should have shot it from the women’s line. That would have been a fair contest,” Smith said as Curry finished his winning shots. “I still root for Sabrina. But she should have shot from the three-point line that the women shoot from.”
Oh, the silliness in Indianapolis. Ionescu did not lose because she fired from the men’s line. An all-time player barely survived her best shot inside Lucas Oil Stadium. “Why are you putting those boundaries on her? She wanted to shoot from there,” broadcast partner Reggie Miller said.
“She should have shot from the women’s line,” Smith said. “There is a women’s tee in golf and there is a men’s tee for a reason.”
“According to you,” said Miller, “you want her to be playing with dolls.”
“No, I want her to shoot from where you shoot from,” Smith said. “And there is nothing wrong with playing with dolls.”
At that moment, TNT should have ended the broadcast and saved a few million viewers from wasting their time. Yet Barkley was left to remind us why sharp minds in sports media — Bob Costas is one — have inexplicably found trouble with bosses when Chuck can say what the hell he wants. In a network gaffe, Draymond Green was invited to join an alternate All-Star broadcast with Barkley. Never mind his three sickening 2023 episodes involving players and recent comments by one of them, Jusuf Nurkic, that Green is “going to hit somebody else again.” That was enough to put Barkley in horrendous water.
“Hey Reggie, we love you, let’s not have another All-Star in Indiana,” Green said to Miller, the former Pacers star. “Let’s let this be the last one, my friend.”
Said Barkley, out of nowhere: “Hey Reggie. If you had a chance of being in the cold, or being around a bunch of homeless crooks in San Francisco, which would you take? You can’t even walk around there.”
“Yes, you can walk around,” said Green, defending his city, which will host the All-Star Game next year.
“Yeah, with a bulletproof vest,” Barkley said. “The bad thing about all this rain, it’s not raining in San Francisco to clean up those dirty-ass streets they got there. San Francisco, it’s a great city, but all that dirtiness and homelessness, y’all gotta clean that off the streets.”
So, in one hapless swoop, we have an analyst making fun of Ionescu’s range and another trashing San Francisco for a homeless plague. This is the All-Star Game, the zenith of the sport? What is the point of having it?
By canceling it, no one would have watched the East beat the West in a 211-186 farce in which Silver said, “We need players to play defense. We need them to care about this game.” They don’t care, with Anthony Davis listing his favorite highlight: “I think the best, we were talking about it, was the Bulls and the Pacers dunkers. The trampolines. Like, they were very, very impressive.”
Is that why LeBron James, who has spent 20 nights at this game only to see it devolve, left the arena in his uniform? “I think it’s something we need to figure out,” he said. “Where is the median? This is what a lot of the games are starting to look like too. We wanted to get more pace into the games. We wanted to get more shots. We wanted the game to be more free-flowing. We stopped letting the game — be freedom of movement. That’s what our games are like in the regular season now. They let us tighten up in the postseason.”
Then, where are Silver and Andre Iguodala, executive director of the Players Association? Shouldn’t they make the regular season more enticing to attract megabucks from currently bidding media companies? “It’s a deeper dive into a conversation of how we can shore up this game,” James said. “Obviously from a player’s perspective, it’s fun to get up and down. But at the end of the day, our competitive nature doesn’t like to have free-flowing scoring like that. But I think the good thing that came out of tonight was none of the players were injured, and everybody came out unscathed or how they were before the game started. So it’s a deeper conversation.”
Instead, we wonder why TNT heads down a commentary slope that makes us ask why “Inside The NBA” still exists. Does David Zaslav, who signs Barkley’s check at Warner Bros. Discovery, know the ratings for “King Charles” are worse than “South Park” reruns? Barkley’s show with Gayle King has lost 20 percent viewership since November. In January, the program drew only 95,000 in the 25-54 demographic.
That’s 95,000 more than should have watched Sunday night.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.