This NBA All-Star Weekend, the World Needs to Beat Us Down

NBA All-Star Weekend, and I say this with love, is weird, boring bullshit. The All-Star Game itself is fine, and mostly worth watching. Anthony Davis is going to be on the receiving end of Stephen Curry alley-oops on national television, and we'd do well not to waste opportunities to witness it. But the possibility of a gruesome injury to a fan-favorite during a friendly match, let alone the probability-unto-certainty of Charles Barkley and Shaq once again subjecting us to hoops Luddite proverbs, is enough to make even people that love the NBA and dislike profanity say, aloud, "Fuck this."

This year, and perhaps only this year, the NBA is tinkering with the broken shards of this burlesque show ever so slightly, altering the traditional Rookie-Sophomore game into a battle of Domestic Rookies/Sophomores against International Rookies/Sophomores. It's telling, in mostly unflattering ways, that this small shift qualifies as a big deal. But that doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea. Perhaps what All-Star Weekend was missing all along was a sense of national honor being at stake.

And so now we have something like a war, but not like the scary/sad kind of war. Imagine Red Dawn, except instead of Soviets and Cubans, the American heartland is invaded by a coalition of Greeks, Australians, Canadians, and some guys from Germany, Senegal, and other basketball-crazy milieus. (Also, swap out the retro Cold War politics for appallingly uninterested defense.) The Rising Stars challenge is not quite the All-Star Weekend event in most desperate need of change, but some cunning folks in the Adam Silver regime saw a golden opportunity to get Andrew Wiggins and Giannis Antentokounmpo on the same team, and credit to them for knowing what to do with it.

If this serves the NBA's longstanding scheme to expand the league's reach and slowly conquer foreign markets—until NBA basketball succeeds where Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan failed—it should at least also give us some dunks to watch. When Giannis is a grizzled third-year player next season this format should be either jettisoned faster than Clear Pepsi, or expanded into more of a Domestic Versus International Youngish NBA Players Game, presented by whatever brand is smart enough to align itself with a game in which every single point is scored via alley-oop.

International players have been a boon for the NBA for long enough that even casual fans can tick off the names of all-time greats from abroad—Dirk, Ginobili, Nash, Hakeem, Yao Ming, Adonal Foyle. For their sake, and the sake of wide-eyed potential NBA consumers around the world, the Rising Stars game's new format is a fitting tribute, and perhaps also an oblique apology for consistently walloping every international team during the Worlds and the Olympics. This Rising Stars game may very well may be the last time an international team takes down the hegemon of both the basketball and non-basketball world, at least until Anthony Davis retires.

Fittingly, this newly revamped event will be sponsored this year by Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, better known by their less international-sounding acronym, BBVA. The second largest bank in Spain, BBVA became an official NBA sponsor several years ago, setting up shop in the Southern states, dutifully putting their name on the Rising Stars Challenge, and otherwise positioning themselves as the only bank that truly gives a shit about NBA fans. Is it your eccentric dream to have a debit card with the logo of your favorite team? There is only one bank/banco that can do that for you. That some Iberian bankers are the official sponsors of this year's USA vs. The World exhibition is straight from David Frum's sketchpad, with all the Manichean subtexts that implies. But here, as elsewhere in this game, global conflict and ravening globalization is rather delightfully shrunken down to playfighting-puppies scale.

Unfortunately for American exceptionalists and/or nativist street gangs, the foreign team in the Rising Stars Challenge looks extremely good—the sort of squad built expressly for exhibition blow outs. There is the looming terror of a half-court dunk by the Greek Freak. There is the likelihood of Andrew Wiggins scoring on frightened Americans at will then screaming, "This is my hoase, eh!" There is the glowering antipodean golem that is Steven Adams—or there was, until he got hurt and was replaced by the exuberantly violence-prone Jusuf Nurkic—and there is Adams' (open) three-draining Oceanic rival Dante Exum. The august presence and unconventional grooming of Dennis Schröder. All athletic, all with something to prove, all conspicuously more exciting than their homegrown counterparts, a passel of tedious triple-named lumps like Michael Carter-Williams or Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. The only American kid with any personality chops at all is Elfrid Payton, and most of that has to do with his cool hair. This American team is a human sacrifice.

Not that anyone should bet money on an exhibition game with a one-off, but the smart money would certainly seem to be on the international players beating the Americans handily, and quite possibly to the point that the final score could serve as the most embarrassing national failure on our home soil since the War of 1812. On the bright side, Americans will still be able to brag afterwards about spending a million times more on our military industrial complex than the rest of these countries put together. Which is no kind of bright side, really, but there's no reason we can't enjoy this as a bit of basketball masochism. If we're going to get what we deserve, we might as well enjoy it.