Our Jazz All-Stars (Gary Dineen - NBAE/Getty Images)

The most over-hyped thing about the NBA season in my opinion is the All-Star Game. It has so much potential to be an extremely entertaining mid-season perk, but always fails to meet my expectations. When I sit down to watch it, I hope it will be a competitive battle that comes down to the wire. I hope that our most talented players will be able to give us a show in the All-Star Game with the dramatics it has the potential to create.

But it always falls short. It is ridiculous. Everyone and their dog dunks the ball at least once. I haven’t watched all the All-Star games throughout history, in fact I have only watched probably the past three critically, so perhaps they have just been declining over the years. Nonetheless, recent games are just essentially 48 minutes of showboating, where every possession seems to end in a dunk or a turnover. I have lost interest.

In order to perk people’s interest, we need to make the All-Star Game worth something. I propose that we make the All-Star Game similar to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. In MLB, the winner out of the National League and the American League gets homefield advantage in the World Series. The NBA All-Star Game and the MLB All-Star game certainly aren’t exactly the same, seeing how the East and West don’t play by different rules as opposed to the NL and AL in Baseball. In the NBA, the Eastern Teams play other Eastern Teams more often, and vice versa with Western teams, so you simply cannot go by overall record or homecourt advantage. It’s a skewed measurement since one side’s teams could be generally worse. Therefore, the NBA All-Star Game should decide home court advantage, which would in turn make the All-Star game more competitive, fixing the problems I stated above.