What I Heard at NBA All-Star Weekend: Ideas to Stop Tanking, LeBron James Retirement Plans

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Hello again, welcome back to Open Floor, from Los Angeles, winding down after another NBA All-Star weekend. A successful All-Star weekend no less, with the NBA basking in the afterglow of a competitive game—or games, I guess—that quieted the criticism of the league’s marquee midseason event. For now, at least.

Pod Alert

Grant Liffmann, NBC Sports’s front office insider and former Atlanta Hawks executive, joined me to unpack an eventful All-Star weekend. How did the NBA get the game right? Is there a fix to All-Star Saturday night? And we unpack Adam Silver’s comments about tanking and what the league can do to curb it. Listen here, here and here.

Widely viewed All-Star Game

NBC Sports reported that Sunday’s All-Star Game averaged 8.8 million viewers across NBC, Peacock and Telemundo, earning the largest audience since 2011. It represented an 87% bigger audience than last year’s game, which aired on TNT, a remarkable number given the early start time (5 p.m. ET) to accommodate NBC’s coverage of the Olympics.

Jayson Tatum’s injury return timeline

Is Jayson Tatum closing in on a return? If you’re into tea-leaf reading, the announcement Sunday that Tatum collaborated with NBC on a documentary series that will chronicle his recovery is certainly eyebrow raising, as is NBC picking up the March 1 game between the Celtics and 76ers. For the record, people close to Tatum continue to tell me a return is still up in the air. Ultimately, they say, it will boil down to whether Tatum believes he can return at or close to the level he was at when he went out.

Ideas to fix tanking

NBA executives I talked to appeared pleased by Adam Silver’s answers on Saturday to questions about the league’s tanking problem. Silver didn’t promise any quick fixes, acknowledging the fundamental problem the league has is that the draft is a mechanism—for some the only mechanism—for teams to improve.

“We’ve got to look at some fresh thinking here,” Silver said. “What we’re doing, what we’re seeing right now is not working, there’s no question about it. Yes, is there more I can do? Have I attempted not only to respond to behavior we’ve seen but send a clear message that we’re going to be scrutinizing everything we see going forward? Absolutely.”

Privately, Silver has been repeating what he has been saying publicly: Everything is on the table. And while there have been some radical ideas—abolishing the draft, which most certainly won’t happen, or eliminating the lottery entirely—my sense is that the league will look to take a more restrained approach.

Among the most likely options, team and league sources say: eliminating draft pick protections and blocking teams from drafting in the top four. Getting any changes to draft pick protections past the competition committee could be difficult—pick protections are the grease that gets many trades through—but execs I talk to say if Silver pushes hard for it, they will follow his lead.

Will LeBron James play one more season?

After sitting through LeBron James’s news conference on Sunday, I’m more convinced than ever that we will see James play at least one more season. James didn’t offer any hints, telling reporters, after parrying some incredibly goofy requests for shout-outs (do something about that, NBA), that when he knows, they will.

Still, that in itself is telling. It’s impossible to think James will go out without a farewell tour. He’s arguably the greatest player of all time and you have to believe he wants that career acknowledged. Whether it will happen in Los Angeles is another story. Will James want to return to L.A., where his family is settled, on a reduced salary? Would he make another return to Cleveland? Is Golden State and the chance to pair with Stephen Curry in play? These are the questions James will have to wrestle with. But it sure sounds like he plans to do it.

NBA players on Chris Paul’s retirement

On Saturday, addressing media at his All-Star availability, Donovan Mitchell was asked what would be the one thing he would change in today’s NBA if he could. Mitchell used the question to pay tribute to Chris Paul, who retired from the NBA last week.

“The way Chris Paul retired should be changed,” Mitchell said. “He deserved a better way to go out. I wouldn’t be in the NBA without him telling me to go to the NBA. For a Hall of Famer, for a legend, for a point guard like that who has had such a high impact on our game, for him to kind of go out like that is definitely tough.”

Paul’s exit, particularly his exile from the Clippers in December that left him in limbo before he was offloaded to Toronto before the trade deadline, clearly has rubbed a few players the wrong way. “It’s sad the way it happened,” said Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. “I thought he’d get his flowers a little bit different.” Added Carmelo Anthony, “Certified legend. I just wanted him to get the love he deserved.”

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