This year, Valentine’s Day weekend coincided with NBA All-Star Weekend, making for an extravaganza in the San Francisco Bay Area. I made plans to visit the Bay for the weekend to take in the yearly spectacle, but things fell through at the last second. So, I watched the events from home, collected my thoughts and started thinking about how I wanted to format this week’s edition of The Notebook. And, I think that it’s best for us to have a discussion.

It’s no secret that the NBA has been trying to find the right recipe for its All-Star events for years. The league abandoned its traditional Eastern Conference-Western Conference showdown in 2018, opting instead for a player-centric system that allowed the two highest All-Star vote-getters — LeBron James, always, and whoever was No. 2 that year — to draft their own rosters for Sunday night’s All-Star game.

The playground captain system lasted six years, garnering mixed reviews. Viewership continued to tumble throughout, with the 2023 edition of the game amassing just 4.59 million viewers, a record-low. Commissioner Adam Silver announced that the NBA was scrapping the system in 2024, making way for the return of the classic East-West matchup. That also got scrapped after a year.

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This time around, the NBA unveiled a novel, if unnecessarily complex, system for the 2025 All-Star Game. The 24 All-Stars were split into three teams, named for TNT analysts Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal. Those teams then faced off in a four-team tournament on Sunday night, along with the winner of Friday night’s Rising Stars Tournament. It didn’t go that well. To put it flatly, it sucked.

While Shaq’s OGs cruised to victory in the championship game, winning 41-25 over Chuck’s Global Stars, Sunday night’s tournament was bashed by fans and journalists alike. A deluge of outrage poured onto social media at the poor viewing experience. Per the tracking of one commenter, the game featured only 42 minutes of actual basketball play, with 80 minutes being dedicated to advertisements.

The event was marked by stoppages, including a nonsensical, nearly 20-minute game-stopping tribute during the championship match for the “Inside The NBA” crew’s final season with TNT Sports, as the show heads to ESPN and ABC next season. And yes, I mean the game completely stopped so that Kevin Hart could come down and bestow fishing rods and life vests upon Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley. I wish I was joking.

Hart was appointed as the “on-court emcee” for the game, but fans seemed to be beyond tired of his quips by the end of the night. Unfortunately for them, Hart’s commentary was funneled through the stadium PA, so the entire arena, including the players on the court, were able to join me in sitting through the attempts at comedy that were made throughout the evening.

The primary problem with this year’s All-Star Game was that the basketball felt secondary to all of the other theatrics at the Chase Center. I love silly moments in sports — the Celebrity Game is my favorite event of the weekend — but when Mr. Beast and Kevin Hart’s guest appearances are more memorable than the games themselves, there’s a problem.

Several players, including the Hawks’ Trae Young and the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown, shared their own thoughts about the night’s pacing.

“To be honest, I didn’t like it at all … I didn’t like the breaks. The games were so short. Obviously, we can score. So, they’re trying to, I feel like, trying to extend the game, extend the TV time with the breaks and things like that,” Young said.

“I would say it’s not ideal to stop like that if you want guys to be physical. I think guys were still out there having fun,” Brown said. “All the OGs, team old knees and old backs, we came out on top, so I don’t think anyone else should have had any excuses. It’s definitely not ideal.”

The NBA isn’t the only league tinkering with the format for its All-Star celebration. The NHL opted to hold the “4 Nations Face-Off” in lieu of a 2025 All-Star game as a step toward a return to international competition. The event was a massive success, delighting hockey and non-hockey fans alike. Thursday’s charged championship match between the United States and Canada drew 9.3 million viewers on ESPN, outpacing the 2019 Stanley Cup as the NHL’s highest-ever viewed broadcast.

Maybe the NBA should take a page out of the NHL’s book; there’s certainly an appetite for a USA vs. World game, especially with the influx of international talent that the NBA has received over the past decade. Either way it goes, though, it’s very likely that the new NBA All-Star tournament format will be short-lived.

Darrian Merritt is a freshman writing about the cultural and popular appeal of sports in his column, “The Notebook,” which runs every other Monday.