
So it seems that people like dodgeball and drone drops as a prelude to the Pro Bowl all of a sudden. Well, that makes a certain amount of sense. Anything is better entertainment than the Pro Bowl, including anything leading up to the Pro Bowl.
And yet, people still watch the Pro Bowl every year, mostly because it is football and football is still America’s heroin. Besides, getting all snooty about the Pro Bowl without throwing the other all-star games into the pulverizer of public taste seems unfair.
The fact is, all-star games have necessarily drifted further and further away from the sports they are allegedly assigned to depict as the fight to maintain a certain viewership/sponsorship/fanship base has become more acute. They have purpose, but the purpose is not to make the game come alive through the amalgamation of its greatest practitioners.
Indeed, the real value of an all-star game, when you get right down to it, begins and ends with finding out who has been named to each team, which has started to run counter to everything else the games are supposed to be.
And no, this will not be a diatribe against all-star games, the first of which – the NHL’s version – is this weekend on your favorite network. They are and will continue to be handy programming and marketing opportunities, and on a certain albeit lower level of enthusiasm it still succeeds.
But as none of the leagues know whether to play it for laughs or for actual stakes, they end up being hot messes and/or disconnects that leave people confused as to the actual purpose for the damned thing.
I mean, the most important thing about all-star games now happens weeks before, when the teams are named. This is when the players are most invested for completely valid reasons of ego, and those that are named, in some cases, like the validation and then contrive ways not to attend the very event they fight so hard to be invited to on merit. It's "tell me you love me so I can walk away in haughty disdain" at its worst. See the Pro Bowl for this level of absenteeism, the kind you would normally find before an eighth grade science test.
But the naming of the teams matters a great deal, and to a lot of different constituencies.
Players want to know because it allows them to somehow qualitatively declare their worth in the game. Agents want to know entirely for contractual reasons. Teams want to know for marketing purposes. Networks want to know for promotional purposes. And journalists and media members want to know so that they can cobble together boilerplated “snub” stories and other no-brainer debate topics.
This is all awfully serious stuff for something that is essentially formless and blobby. Leagues have stopped trying to make the games competitive because you cannot make players care about something they know doesn’t matter. The 2016 NBA All-Star Game ended 196-173, the NHL changes formats every few years in a desperate attempt to avoid the 15-13 games of yesteryear, Major League Baseball’s attempt to tie its game to World Series home field advantage was a much-derided failure, and the Pro Bowl remains the Pro Bowl.
Even the skills competitions they have tied to the game to extend it a full weekend of marketing opportunities have been a mixed bag. Hence, dodgeball and drone drops.
And the leagues keep trying to wedge fun and seriousness together in hopes of making the all-star game concept mean everything to everyone, which is straight out of Bad Marketing 101. For example, they continue to think fan voting is a good idea while neutralizing the fan vote because fans . . . well, fans have decided to desecrate the ballot box with fun ideas.
It is why the NHL so aggressively tried to deny fan voting favorite John Scott a place in its all-star festivities last year even though the journeyman Scott stole the show, and it is why the NBA tweaked its voting format to keep the Republic of Georgia from packing the West starting lineup with favorite son Zaza Pachulia. In such scenarios, those all-important starting spots are suddenly taken from players who agents complains violently that their guy got kept out of their rightful places of honor in the pregame intros.
And frankly, since the rest of the weekend is about having fun that people will attend and watch on television, the John Scotts and Zaza Pachulias matter a hell of a lot more than which deserving player comes off the bench first. It doesn’t mean Scott and Pachulia are anything other than what we all agree they are -- hard-working pros who happen to have an appealing and very unintended gimmick. It means that the fans have decided they want to have fun with the concept and the leagues cannot abide fun if there’s any constituency that might be offended.
And until that clash of cultures is fixed, the all-star game as a concept will continue to battle for meaning in a changing consumer culture.
But maybe if you let fans vote for one goofy player, and then if you put John Scott and Zaza Pachulia in the dodgeball game . . . hmmm, I see marketing opportunities here. Lots and lots of promotional campaigns too. And snubs. I see snubs.
And off we go again.
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