All-Star Game winners, losers: Haliburton is people’s MVP

He ended up putting on an outside shooting exhibition, hitting 10 of his 14 triples for 32 points, and delivering six assists, including a Jason “White Chocolate” Williams-style elbow pass to Lillard for a three.

Damian Lillard

Is it a little gauche to intentionally try to win All-Star Game MVP? Maybe, but that never stopped a player like Kobe Bryant from trying for the trophy. Lillard scored 39 points on 14-of-26 shooting and 11-of-23 from three-point range, nailing some extremely deep triples for his first year on the Eastern Conference squad.

While Lillard hasn’t had a ton of postseason success, he has done extremely well with fake-ish NBA awards. He took home the inaugural and highly manufactured MVP from the 2020 “bubble” season in Orlando. Lillard has won two Three-Point Contests, an NBA Teammate of the Year and two Big Sky Conference Player of the Year awards. Now he’s added an All-Star MVP.

Sure, he took 11 more shots than his rival, Haliburton, to score just seven more points. Sure, the Indiana crowd heartily booed Lillard as he held up the trophy. But in the history books, people will see the trophy and not the gunning or the crowd’s displeasure.

Karl-Anthony Towns

Towns competed in the Three-Point Contest this year, but he submitted an audition tape for next year’s dunk contest during Saturday’s game. He had a stunning 50 points on 23-of-35 shooting, including a highlight reel of jams.

The downside? Every shot he took that wasn’t a layup or dunk. Towns went 19-of-22 from two-point range, but only 4-of-13 from deep. He probably could have passed to teammate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (12-of-16, 7-of-10 from three-point range) on a couple of those long bombs. SGA is also a minor winner, but it’s hard to give out more than one of those to a team that lost by 25 points.

Doc Rivers

Did Doc Rivers deserve to coach the Eastern Conference All-Star team after taking over the Milwaukee Bucks at midseason? Probably not, but those are the rules. He was 3-7 with Milwaukee since assuming the head coach, but now he’s 1-0 in All-Star Games! He won the game with masterful coaching advice like, “Shoot it from mid-court, Dame!” and “Guys, it doesn’t look like anyone is guarding the basket.”

But Rivers should be able to bask in this victory and the excellent games by his Bucks — Giannis Antetokounmpo and Lillard combined for 62 points — until his inevitable disappointing playoff loss this May.

Losers

Defense

Adam Silver may have hoped that a return to the All-Star Game’s traditional East vs. West format would increase the game’s competitiveness, but instead we saw a 48-minute layup line. The East scored 211 points while making a record 42 three-pointers, which captain Giannis Antetokounmpo celebrated by declaring, “Winner winner, chicken dinner.”

The biggest sign of the absolute indifference to playing defense is that the two teams combined for three fouls in 48 minutes. That’s right. The teams were so disinterested in making any defensive effort at all that there was less than one foul per quarter, and three blocked shots. Hilariously, one of them came from 6-foot-3 Steph Curry, who wildly celebrated his denial of Paolo Banchero.

Of course, that was followed by an uncontested dunk on the other end.

Old Guys

LeBron James sat out the second half. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George played 10 minutes each. Curry shot 6-of-17, but admittedly that was due to trying a number of trick shots. At least he had eight assists!

The Western Conference was older, and the players seemed to care about the game significantly less than the Eastern Conference did. Plus, Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic, some of the younger stars, seemed to have a great deal of fun in the game but possibly didn’t break a sweat.

Look, it’s not realistic to expect an injured James to care deeply about his 20th All-Star Game, but the fact remains that the Eastern Conference cared a lot about winning this game, and the Western Conference seemed more intent on avoiding injury and getting a good night’s sleep.

Anthony Edwards

The Timberwolves guard declared that he was going to shoot left-handed for the entirety of the game. He didn’t shoot left-handed, or really at all.

Perhaps he was embarrassed by clanking his lefty attempts in the Skills Challenge, but Edwards was invisible in his 13 minutes, finishing with four points after taking just three shots. It’s likely not what the NBA wanted or expected from a player who is considered one of the league’s next big stars. But perhaps he didn’t want to get in the way while his teammate was putting up 35 shots.

TNT’s alternate broadcast

The much-hyped alternate gamecast of the All-Star Game featuring Draymond Green, Charles Barkley and Taylor Rooks fell flat. One reason is that it didn’t feel like much of an alternative. For a decidedly non-serious basketball game, TNT’s regular broadcast was already jokey and irreverent. By contrast, the Chuckster just seemed cranky.

Barkley is normally considered a voice of light-hearted, straight-shooting honesty. He sounded old and conservative during the game, replacing his normal light-hearted jauntiness with complaining and grievances that felt like he wanted the All-Stars to “get off my lawn.” Hating on homeless people makes Barkley sound ancient and unreasonable.

It could be that Barkley simply isn’t used to the length of an NBA game. On “Inside the NBA,” his job is to talk in short segments. This game featured long stretches of actual basketball he had to comment on, for two-and-a-half hours. Green wasn’t the ideal partner, as the post-therapy Draymond was generally positive and non-controversial, leading to a stagnant telecast of a non-competitive game.

And why did we need to see the broadcasters’ faces in a sidebar for the whole game? At this point in television history, viewers can trust that the people speaking during a sporting event are the people announcing it.

Green got his best line in and the end of the game, when longtime Warriors doubter Barkley told him, “Good luck in the play-in.”