Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament was everything the NBA All-Star Game wants to be

To paraphrase a Nobel laureate on the perennial crises

facing another form of live entertainment

, the NBA All-Star Game is an institution that has been dying for 70 years but has yet to succumb. The complaints are persistent,

well-documented

, and mainly attributed to a single factor: players’ lack of effort. An absence of defensive activity, in particular, is said to make All-Star Games almost unwatchable.

For some players,

the lack of effort is not an accident

– the game falls in the middle of the NBA’s All-Star Break, a six-day pause in competitive play that serves as the only meaningful time off during the league’s 82-game regular season. Indeed, many of the players not named to All-Star teams use the break to go on holiday. Despite this tendency, however, the league’s leadership regularly alters its All-Star Weekend program in an (often ineffective) effort to encourage competitive play.

In the last decade alone, the NBA has introduced playground-style team selections (in lieu of players being assigned a team based on conference), clock-free

Elam endings

(too complicated to explain here), and even monetary bonuses, all in an effort to encourage players to take the All-Star Game more seriously. The results have been underwhelmin; even

NBA commissioner Adam Silver seemed bored

when presenting the winner’s trophy after last year’s game.

Related:

Big money, star talent and glam rooms: will Unrivaled transform women’s basketball?

This year, the league is ditching its traditional two-team, single-game All-Star format in favor of a four-team, three-game mini-tournament. Whether this innovation will translate into quality basketball, however, remains to be seen. Given the All-Star Game’s recent history, it seems unlikely.

Further tinkering with the All-Star Game format continues to be limited by multiple factors, including the game’s relative rarity – as an annual event, fans and NBA executives alike must wait 12 months between each iteration, making trial-and-error innovation a time-expensive process. Fortunately, the NBA is no longer the only league experimenting the professional basketball space.

Unrivaled

is a professional 3-on-3 women’s basketball league currently in the middle of its first season. With its recognisable coaches and nomadic structure (ie teams are not tied to specific cities), Unrivaled at first appears to be the women’s version of the Big3, the men’s 3-on-3 league

founded in 2017

by Ice Cube. There are, however, several critical differences. Unrivaled, for example, features full-court play while the Big3 is a half-court game. The most important distinguishing feature, however, is in the type of players each league attracts – while the Big3’s rosters are filled out mainly by a mix of retired NBA players and younger, not-

quite

-NBA-level teammates, Unrivaled’s teams entirely consist of active WNBA players.

There are a few notable absences—neither superstar

Caitlin Clark

nor

reigning WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson

are playing in this year’s competition. Many of women’s basketball’s other leading names, however, are present: Brittney Griner, Sabrina Ionescu, Aliyah Boston and Breanna Stewart are just the most known among the

many

other WNBA All-Stars currently playing on Unrivaled squads. Even if Unrivaled’s only contribution to professional basketball was the concept of an off-season 3-on-3 league featuring the world’s best players, it would a worthy addition to the sporting calendar. The league’s greatest innovation, however, is found within one of its side competitions.

In addition to its core 3-on-3 competition, Unrivaled also incorporated a 1-on-1 tournament into its inaugural season and, in doing so, may have introduced a competition format that is exactly what the NBA (and its players) are looking for in an annual event tied to All-Star Weekend. The 1-on-1 tournament, which ended Friday when forward (and Unrivaled cofounder) Napheesa Collier defeated rookie Aaliyah Edwards in the best-of-three finals, offers a level of competition that many fans would love to see in an NBA All-Star setting.

Despite being one of the most common forms of playground basketball, the game’s 1-on-1 variant has never taken off as a spectator sport. Red Bull, the energy drink company,

sponsored tournaments a decade ago

and NBA Hall of Famer Tracy McGrady’s

Ones Basketball League

was won by a minor-league men’s basketballer in 2022, but neither featured the world-class talent or high-profile media coverage of the Unrivaled tournament (indeed, in the US the finals of Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament was broadcast in primetime on TNT, a channel associated with professional basketball owing to its decades-long association with the Emmy-winning programme

Inside the NBA

). Based on the players’ exhausted demeanours, they took the tournament seriously and, with a few tweaks, so too could NBA players.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a novel format, Unrivaled’s first attempt at 1-on-1 tournament stumbled into a few areas for improvement. The league employed a “make it, take it” rule (ie a player who scores also starts the next play with possession of the ball) that, while appropriate among amateurs on the playground, probably provides an unsporting advantage to professional players – the player who scored first won 19 of 24 games in the tournament. Similarly, the purposefully-designed short games (the first player to reach 11 points wins) are made a bit

too

brief by the use of a two- and three-point basket scoring system. Switching to a one- and two-point system (common in informal basketball) would give each game more room for drama.

Additional rule changes could also circumvent one of the less spectator-friendly truisms of 1-on-1 basketball – the format favours big, post-style athletes who play with their back to the basket. There was only one guard, for example, among the four semi-finalists of Unrivaled’s tournament and, while precise footwork in the post is attractive to basketball afficionados, casual fans are more likely to tune in to see flashy handles and difficult jump shots. Unrivaled’s rules allowed for two neutral individuals to stand on either side of the court and receive passes from (and return passes to) players after defensive rebounds. Removing these neutral intruders would change gameplay in favor of players with advanced ball-handling skills.

The biggest hurdle in translating Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 concept to the NBA’s All-Star Weekend, however, would be a familiar one: motivation. In addition to prestige, the champion of the Unrivaled’s tournament won $200k,

nearly

the amount that the

WNBA’s highest-paid players earn in an entire season

. To offer a similar incentive to NBA players, a tournament would have to include prize pool worth tens of millions of dollars.

There is a scenario, however, in which money isn’t the only motivator. Players seem to care more about the

NBA’s two-year-old (and confusingly formatted) NBA Cup

, for example, with each passing year. The intrinsically individual nature of a 1-on-1 tournament could appeal to that same competitive instinct, especially among the league’s legacy-aware superstars. Moreover, the introduction of an individual-focused subsport would give the NBA a new tool which rival leagues like the NFL, MLB or Premier League would struggle to replicate with their respective sports. And, of course, fans and sports television’s talking heads alike would have a new vein of basketball debate at which to mine.

Late NBA icon Kobe Bryant famously

stated that he’d never lost a 1-on-1 game

. Such statements (and Bryant’s face as he made it) demonstrate how important such claims are to many players. Based on Collier’s win in the Unrivaled tournament, a player with Bryant’s skillset (especially his turnaround jumper) in a forward’s body would probably do well—think Kevin Durant, or well-known Kobe-fan Jayson Tatum. Such predictions, however, remain unproveable within the context of current All-Star Weekends.

Were the NBA to adopt Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament, it wouldn’t be the first time the league has looked to outside competitions for inspiration. Indeed, the three-point line so important to modern basketball was first made popular by a 1970s rival, the ABA – even more relevantly, the

ABA also popularized the dunk contest

, now an All-Star Weekend mainstay. Nearly 50 years later, perhaps it’s time to once again look outward for a solution to the NBA’s All-Star problem. Until then, Unrivaled’s thrilling 1-on-1 tournament remains … well, unrivaled.