Three of the four major sports (if you still include hockey as the 4th major sport) are in the middle of All-Star season. The NHL just announced it's starting line-up for the game in Montreal in February. The NBA is two weeks away from announcing it's starting line-up for the gala in Phoenix. The NFL announced the 2008 Pro Bowl starters a few weeks ago. What do all these games have in common besides being boring, high scoring and a mecca for athletes getting in trouble - they are always controversies on who is named to the teams.
This year is no different. The NHL has only 4 teams represented in the starting line-up. Two of the 10 starters for the NBA festivities will be from China. This is possible because of ballot stuffing from the basketball crazy Chinese. Therefore two players will be snubbed and the media will be angry at the process of choosing the stars. The NFL might be the most messed up. Five to seven of the starters are usually unknown to fans (the offensive and defensive lines) and therefore end up being chosen on reputation not on performance, for example Jason Peters of the Buffalo Bills. Peters held out all of training camp to get a better contract, showed up on Saturday before the first game on Sunday - missed that game and then got owned the rest of the season and was even pulled from at least two games for poor performance. That sounds like an all-pro to me!
So after some deep thought, it is pretty obvious that the fans can't be trusted to pick the all-stars. The next logical choice would seem to be coaches and players. This is a little better as they obviously know who has been playing well and poorly as they watch film on each other, but there is still room for error based on voting for teammates or friends.
So the solution you ask - let's go retro! Have a team of all-stars chosen by coaches and players (the best option) play the championship team from the previous year. This does a couple of things. It rewards the championship team for their performance, it showcases the "team" concept as some players that would never be on an all-star team get to play in a high profile game and it minimizes the number of fringe all-stars. What I mean by this is instead of naming 30 NBA all-stars you would only name 15. This would make it easier to narrow done the best of the best and then instead of arguing as we did last season if Jose Calderon was an all-star, there wouldn't even have been a discussion because he was the 8th to 10th best PG and only 3 or 4 would be named in my vision.
Another solution - don't play the game. Name the teams, give the players their bonuses and go home.
Or we could follow the Nascar example and make the all-star game the first game of the season. It becomes a showcase for the best from the previous year and you don’t get some flash-in-the-pan who’s had a good first half of one season make it on the ballot at all.
ReplyDeleteNot a bad thought, just don't know if it works based on the effort the leagues now put into their opening night/week games. Baseball has even made the Cubs play night games. Football has the Thursday night opener which features big concerts and the Super Bowl champions (back to my original solution) and the NBA and NHL have recently gone to Europe and Asia to open the season and promote the game outside of North America.
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