On Sunday night, the NBA All-Star Weekend festivities concluded with the game itself, which actually consisted of four 12-minute games as part of a round robin tournament. The young American team won the tournament, defeating a team filled with US veterans as well as international players, with Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards winning the All-Star Game MVP award.
The NBA has changed the All-Star Game format several times over the past few years in an effort to drum up any kind of competitive spirit among the players, and the product appeared to be an improvement on Sunday compared to what we've seen before.
However, that didn't stop St. John's head coach and basketball icon Rick Pitino from proposing another idea to move the event forward.
"It's great to see the new format with the All-Star Game. I suggested the NBA do the Ryder Cup with basketball. Starting in Greece and then going back to the states. It would be incredible and even more popular than the Ryder Cup," he wrote on Twitter.
The NBA implementing its own version of golf's Ryder Cup would certainly be worth seeing, and would continue the theme of US vs. international players that started this year.
For now, it seems like the league is happy with what we saw from the players on Sunday night, as the game lived up to the billing and produced some entertainment for the fans in attendance at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles.
Now, the league will move forward into an expanded season, although Adam Silver and company still have a ton of questions to answer, including the rise of artificial intelligence, gambling, and a number of other factors that could have a major impact on the game as we know it.
