The NBA All-Star Game has undergone plenty of changes over the year as Adam Silver and the league try to find the best way to showcase the biggest stars in basketball every February. For this year's All-Star Game, we got the players split and picked into four separate teams of smaller-than-normal rosters and then playing a four-team tournament to determine the winner with a race-to-40 in the games.
In theory, you can see some merit to this idea. It adds a new level of competition to the event and gives some newfound excitement for what could happen with the different combinations of players.
However, suffice it to say that Golden State Warriors resident enigma Draymond Green, who was working the NBA All-Star Game and the weekend in Oakland as the host, is not a fan of the new format and what it means for the game.
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Draymond Green roasts new NBA All-Star Game format on the league's own broadcast
Between the first and second semifinal matchups of the NBA All-Star Game, Green was at the studio desk for TNT. Never one who's afraid to speak his mind, the Warriors star ripped the All-Star Game format to shreds:
"You work all year to be an All-Star, and you get to play up to 40 and then you're done. This is so unfair to Victor Wembanyama, who just took this game really seriously, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who just took this game really seriously. When you talk about chasing after the points records — Melo, Kobe and all these guys who've had great scoring nights — they don't get the opportunity to do that in this game. All so we can watch some Rising Stars — we about to watch the Olympic team, now we get the treat of watching the Olympic team play against a U19 team. Come on, what are we doing?!"
You can watch Green's full comments and evisceration of the format below (including the vitriol in his voice when he said "Rising Stars".
Draymond Green cooked ts was garbage pic.twitter.com/tsZcmPSx2f
— Bones🦴 (@Boness305) February 17, 2025
When Green is off-base, it's easy to call him out for it. That's not the case in this instance, though. He's absolutely spot on with what we're talking about here.
Yes, you can fully understand the league and the commissioner tweaking things to try and make All-Star Weekend and the game itself more entertaining. But when you do something like this with the format that makes the contest essentially unrecognizable, that's too much to consider. It takes away records, it takes away history and that's before you even talk about the untenable down time it caused on Sunday night as well.
It's absolutely wild that Draymond Green went on the league's TNT broadcast of the All-Star Game and made comments like this. You don't see many athletes with the stones for something like that — though Dray is a different breed in that capacity. More importantly, though, it helps his case that he's absolutely right.