All-Star Addendum: Let the Players Bet
The real way to fix the NBA All-Star game.
The All-Star game has no integrity. It is a contrived, made for TV spectacle. It’s virtue is that you get to see all the stars in one place. But that virtue is drenched by the cold water of player effort.
Last week I offered a solution to this problem: have the players play in a 3-on-3 tournament. Shorter bursts of excitement, a different format, entirely new teams and a new composition. Sprinkle novelty all around, and use a tournament format to encourage competition.
That’s a good start, but it is missing a simple component. The players must be able to bet on themselves or their team.
During the course of the regular season, players are not able to bet. Having players gamble on the outcome of games raises the appearance of impropriety. Whether or not players are throwing games—if you have players betting on games, it becomes obvious that they could be. That they may want to.
But the All-Star game tournament would not be the sacred realm of NBA regular season play. It is an exhibition; a self-contained phenomenon. The NBA All-Star game only matters to history and television networks.
Letting the players bet on themselves would dramatically increase player interest, because it would dramatically increase the extent to which players care about the outcome of the games.
In 2024, nearly 70 million adults bet more than $23 billion on the Super Bowl.
If the NBA could increase the All-Star tournament viewership from 5.5 million to 8 million, and create a Super Bowl level betting event (approx. $300 bet per viewer), there would be more than $2 billion in play during All-Star weekend.
That level of liquidity is more than enough to take bets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Certainly, with potentially millions on the line for a game of 3-on-3, players would be enticed to play.
What’s more you could make it so the players playing in the game had the highest limits. The NBA could partner with a sports book to give the competing players multi-million dollar limits.
The All Star game becomes an exclusive opportunity to wager on oneself at the highest stakes.
The stakes are low for the league. But they could be astronomical for the players. That’s why they’d play. And that’s why we would watch, and bet, and talk about it.