The five best NBA All-Star Games ever

4. 1993

The 1993 NBA All-Star Game in Salt Lake City often gets overlooked in some of these conversations but this was a very entertaining basketball game that featured so many of the game’s all-time greats right in their prime. It was also the first All-Star appearance for some guy named Shaquille O’Neal.

Shaq was the starting center for the East and was joined by another first-timer, Larry Johnson, as well Isiah Thomas, Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan. On the bench were guys like Dominique Wilkins, Patrick Ewing and Joe Dumars. The West countered with a starting five of David Robinson, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, Karl Malone and John Stockton, every one of whom was a member of the previous summer’s Dream Team at the Barcelona Olympics. In fact, eight of the 12 members of that team were in this game and it would have been nine had Chris Mullin not been out with an injury. Magic and Bird were both retired by this point and Christian Laettner wasn’t at this level. That’s some star power right there. Hakeem Olajuwon even had to come off the bench for the West.

The game itself was very competitive. The West led 27-26 after the first and took a five-point lead into the half before the East got it down to two at the end of the third, then outscored the West 35-33 in the final period to take the game to overtime. The West came out on top by a final score of 135-132 and co-MVP awards were handed out to Utah’s own Karl Malone and John Stockton, which made for a nice story. And it’s not as if they didn’t deserve it. Malone scored a team-high 28 points on 11-for-17 shooting while also pulling down 10 rebounds and Stockton had 15 assists. Michael Jordan led the East with 30 points, the weekend’s 3-point champ Mark Price came off the bench with 19 and Shaq scored 14 in his debut. The only player to go scoreless in this game was first-timer Shawn Kemp, who played just nine minutes in the first of his six All-Star Game appearances.