Part of [Nick Wright](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/nick-wright/)‘s job is to broadcast controversial sports opinions, and on Bill Simmons’ _The Ringer_ podcast, the _First Things First_ host did not disappoint. Well, he may have disappointed anyone unwilling to widen this country’s racial divide for the sake of basketball TV ratings.
Simmons, a former ESPN personality who first rose to prominence as “The Sports Guy,” wrote the book on basketball — literally: _The Book of Basketball: The [NBA](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/nba/) According to The Sports Guy_ came out in 2009. He doesn’t think the oft-tinkered NBA All-Star Game, which takes place on Sunday, is fixable — but Wright does.
“In four years _if_ your guy Kon Knueppel continues on this trajectory … ,” Wright said. “And we just have to say, ‘You know what? PC headlines be damned. White guys vs. Black guys.'”
“I’m telling you right now — guys would play fucking hard,” he continued. “There would be a real edge to the game.”
The annual NBA All-Star Game has become synonymous with lazy play — no one wants to get hurt in the middle of a grueling season; very little defense is played. This result is a high-scoring alley-oop-fest broken up only by about a million three-point attempts. In a desperate attempt to make the exhibition game viewable, the NBA has changed formats like it changes alternate jerseys: This year, it’s a three-team, round-robin tournament format featuring U.S. vs. World teams. Last year, there were four squads: the OGs, Young Stars, Global Stars and Rising Stars. Tune-in was not great at less than 5 million viewers across Turner’s TNT, TBS and TruTV channels.
“It certainly would get a lot of talking points going that week,” Simmons acknowledged of Wright’s idea.
“_And_ we are getting close to a place where it’d be like, ‘Oh! That would be a good game!'” Wright said. “There hasn’t been a moment in the NBA in the last 50 years where if that ended up just by chance being the game, you could see either team winning.”
For what it’s worth and to be fair, those are both mostly accurate points.
Wright clarified that the team of white players would get “all of the Eastern Europeans,” which counts Nikola Jokić (Serbia) and Luka Dončić (Slovenia) in. So that helps — a lot.
“In the meantime, I don’t know what the hell you do,” Wright said.
Right. But still maybe not this.
The NBA is not the only professional league in search of a working format on which to honor and platform its best and most popular players all at once. The NFL has all-but-abandoned its own all-star contest, the Pro Bowl, which always took place at the end of the playoffs — these days it is a series of football-like drills culminating in a flag football game. Major League Baseball has probably the best All-Star Game going because of the small chance of injury in a mostly non-contact sport.