LOS ANGELES — NBA All-Star Weekend is essentially a massive basketball business convention. This is the best way to appreciate it. At its worst, as a televised sporting event, All-Star Weekend can look like a mess of manufactured drama and unfunny jokes, every inch of it branded and sold, to the point where the whole experience kind of deadens your soul a little bit.
That's a valid interpretation. Definitely. But as someone who's come to stupidly love this weekend every year, I think that worrying about its entertainment value or artistic integrity is beside the point. The weekend works best as a window into all the different economies that make basketball weirder and more interesting than any sport on the planet.