What was to be an event to rehabilitate the National Basketball Association’s thug image, the NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas was “an unmitigated failure, and any thoughts of taking the extravaganza to New Orleans in 2008 are total lunacy.”
The game is a sloppy, boring, half-hearted mess. The dunk contest is contrived and pointless. The celebrity contest is unintended comedy. And, worst of all, All-Star Weekend revelers have transformed the league’s midseason exhibition into the new millennium Freaknik, an out-of-control street party that features gunplay, violence, non-stop weed smoke and general mayhem.
When people start checking out of their luxury hotels in fear of their safety, there’s a problem.
All-Star Weekend can no longer remain the Woodstock for parolees, wannabe rap artists and baby’s mamas on tax-refund vacations.
Ouch! How did the NBA get to this point? Can it, like Ron Artest, be saved from itself?Â
related: Get the ‘ghetto’ out of sports
