Make the ASG more competitive - name the winners All Star Winners and losers All Star Losers.

I think the only way we can really make players care about the All Star Game is if NBA distinguishes the difference between the winners and losers of the All Star Game.

I think the players will care because the players who normally get selected to the All Star game are the players who likely do care about their legacies. We should be able to compare the players who cared about winning and who didn’t. We already do this with the other NBA games (NBA champions vs NBA finalists, in game tournament, Olympic gold vs silver). Those games were a lot more intense because there’s a difference between winning and losing. Right now with the all star game, you’ll always be an all star, regardless of if you win or lose.

Take a look at the following NBA Players and how we currently view their all star honors, and how we can view them instead.*

Kobe Bryant | 15x All Star | 10x All Star Winner, 5x All Star Loser

Chris Paul | 11x All Star | 9x All Star Winner, 2x All Star Loser

Russell Westbrook | 9x All Star | 8x All Star Winner, 1x All Star Loser

James Harden | 9x All Star | 6x All Star Winner, 3x All Star Loser

Kevin Durant | 11x All Star | 8x All Star Winner, 3x All Star Loser

Lebron James | 20x All Star | 10x All Star Winner, 10x All Star Loser

Kawhi Leonard | 6x All Star | 4x All Star Winner, 2x All Star Loser

Paul George | 9x All Star | 3x All Star Winner, 6x All Star Loser

Jimmy Butler | 4x All Star | 1x All Star Winner, 3x All Star Loser

Joel Embiid | 5x All Star | 0x All Star Winner, 5x All Star Loser

Anthony Edwards | 2x All Star | 0x All Star Winner, 2x All Star Loser

You can see how players who have said they care about the all star game (Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul, etc) rise to the top, and we should reward them for caring.

This can be extended to contract bonuses as well. For example, Jaylen Brown earned a $1.55M bonus for being selected to the All Star game last year*. If the NBA distinguished winning and losing the All Star Game, the bonus could’ve structured as $2.325M to be an All Star Winner and $775k to be an All Star Loser.

Obviously, if you don’t care about the all star game, then this post isn’t for you, but I think there is a significant amount of fans who, like me, would want to see how the best players in the world duke it out against each other. The Olympic Games were a great example of watching great players care about winning.

If the NBA thinks the losing name is too inflammatory, then maybe they can have the winning team keep their All Star honors and for the losing team to lose their All Star honors.

*I wrote this post last year but got blocked by r/nba mods for having too new of an account, and I’m too lazy to update the all star winners and losers from the last game since I didn’t watch it.