I usually skip the All-Star game. It was more fun 30 or 40 years ago. Excerpts from:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sport...fluff-lincicome-spt-0219-20170218-column.html
the best of these things remains the baseball affair...played the way actual baseball games are played. The NBA game, or the NHL game, or even the worst of the bunch, the NFL waltz and giggle, are awards shows without tuxedos...phony...preening and posing and showing off...peacock flash and flaunt, or to use the official judging criteria, "artistic ability, imagination, body flow and fan response," reducing real games to figure skating.
The question of who has the hardest shot in hockey or who can dribble quickest around traffic cones seldom inspires a bar bet, never mind a bar fight...doing what they would be benched for doing in a regular NBA game..."skills competitions"...admit that the sport itself is too dull to keep the attention of an audience...the circus, where showing off against phantoms draws greater hoots and hollers than real competition.
Whether it is home-run hitting or throwing a football for accuracy or slap shooting or bounce passing...This sort of scam always has been the business of figure skating and gymnastics, in which prizes are awarded for doing the same thing over and over, the only judgment being whether it was done better this time than the last time...
With all of these exhibitions of football, hockey and basketball staged so near to each other, maybe one solution is to do them all at the same time, in the same place — have NBA players try to dribble on ice, or hockey players try to jump, never mind dunk, in the bulky laundry they wear, or football players try to hit a 3-pointer wearing skates...ESPN would create a network for it.