NBA All-Star Weekend (2024)

One week after a busy trade deadline shook up the league, the NBA's best players are in Salt Lake City for the 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend. Follow here as The Athletic's staff offers insights and observations from all of the festivities.

NBA All-Star Weekend schedule and how to watch

Saturday

NBA x HBCU Classic: Grambling State wins 69-64 in OT

Skills Challenge: Team Jazz

3-Point Contest: Damian Lillard (Portland Trail Blazers)

Dunk Contest: Mac McClung (Philadelphia 76ers)

Sunday

Team Giannis beats Team LeBron 184-175, Jayson Tatum (Celtics) wins All-Star MVP

TEAM LEBRON:

• STARTERS: LeBron James (captain), Joel Embiid, Kyrie Irving, Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic
• RESERVES: Anthony Edwards, Jaylen Brown, Paul George, Tyrese Haliburton, Julius Randle, De'Aaron Fox, Jaren Jackson Jr.

TEAM GIANNIS:

• STARTERS: Giannis Antetokounmpo (captain), Jayson Tatum, Ja Morant, Donovan Mitchell, Lauri Markkanen
• RESERVES: Damian Lillard, Jrue Holiday, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, DeMar DeRozan, Pascal Siakam, Bam Adebayo, Domantas Sabonis

Required reading

• NBA All-Star Weekend odds, picks for dunk contest, 3-point shootout
• Marvin Gaye’s iconic NBA All-Star Game national anthem: ‘He turned that thing into his own’
• Why the NBA All-Star jerseys from 1995 and ’96 are still considered the best ever

(Photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)

Three-point shooting.

Team LeBron had two fewer turnovers (12-10), three more offensive rebounds (13-10), and outscored Team Giannis 118-88 in the paint.

Both teams made exactly 3 of 6 non-paint 2s.

But Team Giannis made 29 of 66 3s (43.9 percent), while Team LeBron made "only" 17 of 60 3s (28.3 percent). Tatum, the MVP, made a game-high 10 3s, making up more than half of his record 55 points.

Team Giannis beats Team LeBron 184 to 175 after Damian Lillard hits a 30-footer following Lauri Markkanen's missed corner 3.

Jayson Tatum sets the All-time single-game scoring record in an All-Star Game with 55 points (22 of 31 field goals, 10 of 18 3s, 1 of 2 free throws), while adding 10 rebounds, 6 assists, a steal, and a block.

A Celtic hasn't won All-Star Game MVP in 41 years (Larry Bird in 1982). Tatum, a Kobe Bryant fan, is going to break that streak.

Team LeBron needs a 12-0 run to win this game.

Team Giannis is leaving the door open by taking 40 footers.

Team Giannis won the 3rd quarter 59-49 in what was the highest scoring quarter of the All-Star Game so far. Jayson Tatum leads all scorers with 44 points, with Donovan Mitchell adding 30 for Team Giannis. Joel Embiid has 30 to lead Team LeBron.

The score entering the final quarter of play is 158 to 141, with Team Giannis up. The Target Score is 182. Team LeBron can certainly score 41 points -- the question is, can they do so while playing defense for the first time tonight? Team Giannis made 15 3s in that 3rd quarter, all by Tatum (7/11), Mitchell (4/6), and Lillard (4/6).

We’ve reached the end of three quarters at the 2023 NBA All-Star Game, with Team Giannis leading Team LeBron, 158 to 141. (The two teams tied the first quarter, while Team Giannis won second and third quarter.)

Instead of a timed fourth quarter, the two teams will now play to a “target score” that is 24 points more than the leading team’s current tally. That means the first team to reach 182 points wins. No clock. No commercials. Just: first to 182 wins.

The format is known as the Elam Ending. Its creator is Nick Elam, a 40-year-old Ball State professor and former University of Dayton student who was so frustrated by end-of-game intentional fouling that he vowed to come up with a way to eliminate it.

He spent full summers analyzing end-of-game fouling.Teams that intentionally foul “only win about 1 percent of the time,” he told The Athletic’s Bill Shea in 2020. Because of that, Elam came to the conclusion that the game clock was the problem. “The clock really turns the most important possession of the game into a blooper reel,” he told Shea. “You get clock controversies that drain excitement and add unnecessary controversy.”

Instead of a game clock, Elam proposed teams playing to a target score, set early enough in the game to give the trailing team a chance to come back, but not so early that it’d vaporize the leading team’s advantage.

Nobody agreed with him until 2016, when The Basketball Tournament, an annual $2 million winner-take-all open invitational event aired on ESPN, agreed to try it out during play-in games the following year. It was a hit, so they added it for every tournament game thereafter. Ratings for TBT jumped 17 percent that year.

More importantly, the Elam Ending caught the attention of Chris Paul, then the president of the NBA Players Union. In 2019, Paul coached a team in the TBT event and saw the appeal firsthand.

“For me, a guy who thinks about strategy, as I started watching the games more and more, every game had to have a game-winning shot. You couldn’t just foul. It got exciting,” he told Shea.

Paul pitched NBA commissioner Adam Silver on the idea of using the Elam Ending in the 2020 All-Star Game. Silver, after consulting with members of the league’s competition committee, agreed. They decided to set the target score at 24 to honor Kobe Bryant, who passed away in a helicopter crash just weeks before the event. (Bryant wore the No. 24 jersey over the second half of his career).

The first edition of the Elam Ending at the All-Star Game was a smashing success, with LeBron James’ team edging Giannis Antetokounmpo’s, 157-155, in a high-intensity ending rarely seen in most All-Star games. Players and coaches alike loved the innovation, so the league has pledged to stick with it in future All-Star games. This is now the fourth time we will see it in action.

“Once you see it in action, you realize the whole concept is not to change basketball, it’s to do the opposite — to preserve that more natural and exciting style and pace at the end,” Elam told The Athletic’s Seth Partnow a year later. “So that’s what people were saying. And that’s what people were reacting to, once they had a chance to see it.”

There are no current plans to add the Elam Ending to a regular-season or even an NBA playoff game, though there are plenty who believe it should be the new standard format.

“I love that we are trying it in (the All-Star game) and should use it at some point in G League games and maybe even NBA preseason games,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told Shea via email in 2020.

Jayson Tatum hyped the crowd up as he iso'ed against Celtics teammate Jaylen Brown -- but he dribbled the ball off his foot.

Jaylen Brown then hit Tatum with a stepback 3 and let him know he's too small.

Tatum got a 3 back on Brown, then Brown didn't get a shot off to beat the third quarter buzzer after a half spin in the midrange.

Damian Lillard missed 7 of his first 8 3s

But he made his next 5 in a row, including a casual pullup from 48 feet -- just behind the timeline

3: Karl Malone (played for Utah Jazz)

2: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (passed Wilt Chamberlain in Utah)

1: LeBron James (started 2023 All-Star Game in Utah)

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar passed Wilt Chamberlain against the Utah Jazz, but the game was in Las Vegas

• Tatum: 5
• Markkanen: 4
• Siakam: 4
• James: 3
• James: 3
• Embiid: 3
• Brown: 3
• Edwards: 3
• Sabonis: 3
• Adebayo: 2
• Jackson Jr.: 2
• Randle: 2
• Antetokounmpo: 1
• Doncic: 1
• George: 1
• Gilgeous-Alexander: 1
• Haliburton: 1

LeBron James (hand) is out for the second half, per the NBA

Team Giannis ended the first half on an 8-0 run to win the 2nd quarter 53-46 and take an overall 99-92 halftime lead.

Donovan Mitchell really got going for Team Giannis, scoring 14 of his 16 points in the second quarter and making all five of his field goal attempts in the period. Jayson Tatum leads Team Giannis with 17 points, while Kyrie Irving leads all scorers with 18 points.

The only player who hasn't scored (or taken a shot at all) is De'Aaron Fox.

LeBron James has taken a share of the scoring lead with 13 points to match Jayson Tatum, and masked Jaylen Brown also has 13 off the bench.

Lauri Markkanen (11) and Pascal Siakam (12) are also in double figures for Team Giannis.