For NBA players, the All-Star break is a chance to take a week off and relax. This year, a lot happened over the five-day vacation.
Most notably, superstar forward Kevin Durant was allegedly exposed for running an X burner account that he used to rip on players and coaches across the league, including his own teammates on the Houston Rockets.
Durant took shots at some of the league’s biggest stars, such as Stephen Curry, Kyrie Irving, Luka Dončić, Nikola Jokić and Devin Booker. Teammates Alperen Şengün and Jabari Smith Jr. also caught strays.
“I’m not here to get into Twitter nonsense. My teammates know what it is, we’ve been locked in the whole season,” Durant said to a reporter after the break.
The NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, had been meeting with team owners since December to discuss anti-tanking rules in the league. Tanking is when teams try to lose games in order to give themselves a better chance of landing with the No. 1 overall selection in the draft.
Teams often make personnel changes at the trade deadline to load up on draft picks, making themselves worse in the short-term. No team is a better example of this than the Chicago Bulls, who welcomed seven new players at the deadline and have lost every game so far in February.
The NBA rule changes include draft lottery odds being based on the past two seasons, prohibiting a team from getting a top-four pick in back-to-back-years, locking lottery odds at the trade deadline and more.
These new rules do not apply to this season, so teams like Chicago are trying to put themselves in a place to draft a generational talent, whether it be A.J. Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson or Cameron Boozer.
The All-Star Game featured a new tournament-style format of two United States teams and one team made up of only international players. Silver said he believed the new format would bring some fire back to the game and showcase the league’s international talent, since it has been criticized in the past for lacking competitiveness.
The Minnesota Timberwolves’ guard Anthony Edwards secured the All-Star MVP and said that he enjoyed how intense the game felt. He consistently plays with high effort and never backs down to anyone, not even former President Barack Obama.
Now that March is approaching, the regular season will not last much longer. Teams on the bubble of the playoffs will have to fight for their lives, which should make for exciting games to watch.