Do you like this idea?

Perhaps the 3-win margin needs to be slightly higher or lower.

Comment below!

Is this solution perfect? Absolutely not.

But it addresses two of the NBA’s biggest problems:

— the All-Star Game sucks
— conference strength inequality

Adding these small stakes will make the All-Star Game matter again, and it’ll be a better product for fans.

Point 3:

If a conference is winning every year, that means that the conference is more talented, and thus the path to the Finals is harder, so the victor of the conference should be rewarded.

This would only help to address conference inequality!

Point 2:

Fair, but the NBA is so talented that lower-tier all-stars who are playing harder will beat superstars who aren’t trying. Also, this will even itself out over the years, and most years this tiebreaker won’t even matter.

Point 1:

The coach of the 1 seed in each conference will care about this rule, and will bench players who aren’t trying.

Also, there is so much parody in today’s NBA, and players are delusional about their chances to win it all, so this really wouldn’t apply to most players.

Addressing likely counter-arguments:

1. Stars on bad teams wouldn’t care and still wouldn’t try

2. It’s potentially unfair if a bunch of stars from one conference happen to be hurt around the All-Star Game

3. The West would win every year

Here are my rebuttals:

We don’t want the All-Star Game to feel like a playoff game where players are risking injury…

The stakes always dictate the intensity of the game.

These stakes are enough to get the players to try just *a little* harder and for fans to care a little more. That’s all we need!

Essentially, the All-Star Game acts as a proxy for conference strength when the difference in records is marginal.

In most seasons, this won’t end up mattering.

But it COULD matter, which is enough to make players try harder.

And that’s why it works better than the MLB’s solution.

So if a 62-win team plays against a 50-win team in the Finals, they’d get home court.

But if a 62-win team plays a 60-win team, the difference is marginal and could be a result of playing in an easier conference, so the All-Star Game would decide home court.

MY IDEA:

If the regular season records of the teams in the Finals are within 3 games of each other, the winning conference of the All-Star Game gets home court advantage in the Finals.

Stay with me ⬇️

The solution: the winning conference of the All-Star Game received home court advantage in the World Series.

This made players care, but fans complained that the stakes were too high, so the idea was abandoned in 2016.

Is there a way to tweak this idea and make it work?

The current problem is simple: the players just don’t care enough.

In the midst of a long season, why risk injury for a meaningless game?

The MLB had a similar issue in the early 2000s… let’s take a look at their solution ⬇️

The All-Star game sucks. So here’s a solution for how to fix it while returning it to the West vs. East format we all love.