The NBA All-Star Weekend Revamp Flopped — But Anthony Edwards & Wemby's Electric Rivalry Saved the Night
Anthony Edwards (Team Stars) and Victor Wembanyama (Team World) delivered the most entertaining All-Star duel in years at Chase Center, San Francisco. | Photo: Trendy News / NBA
The NBA arrived in San Francisco with its most dramatic All-Star Weekend overhaul in decades. What unfolded at the Chase Center was equal parts riveting sport, chaotic television, and the birth of a generational rivalry — with Anthony Edwards and Victor Wembanyama at the absolute center of it all.
A New Format, A Divided Response
For years, the NBA All-Star Game has been one of the most criticized events in professional sports — a 48-minute defence-free showcase that often resembled a glorified shootaround more than an elite basketball contest. The 2024 edition, a mind-numbing 211–186 East vs. West final in Indianapolis, was widely considered the absolute low point of the event. Something had to give.
Inspired in part by the staggering success of the NHL's 4 Nations Face-Off, the NBA unveiled a sweeping change for 2025: abandon the traditional Eastern Conference vs. Western Conference format and instead split the league's All-Stars into three distinct rosters. Team Stars, stacked with young American standouts led by Anthony Edwards; Team Stripes, composed of veteran American talent; and Team World, a collection of the league's finest international players anchored by none other than San Antonio Spurs phenom Victor Wembanyama. The three groups would compete in a mini-tournament of short, first-team-to-score format 12-minute games hosted at Chase Center, the home of the Golden State Warriors.
On paper, it sounded thrilling. The concept borrowed the competitive charge of international basketball — the kind of fierce pride that had electrified the 2024 Paris Olympics gold medal game between Team USA and France — and transplanted it into the NBA's mid-season celebration. But as the broadcast got underway on a Sunday afternoon, with TNT's Kevin Hart presiding over a jam-packed production schedule, the cracks in the plan became visible almost immediately.
This sucks, it ain't basketball.
— Draymond Green, live on TNT broadcast, NBA All-Star Sunday 2025
Golden State Warriors star Draymond Green, joining TNT's coverage as a guest analyst, held nothing back. His four-word verdict summed up the mood of many watching at home. Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young was equally blunt, telling reporters afterward that he found the format wholly unsatisfying. "I didn't like it at all," Young said. "I didn't like the breaks. The games were so short." The relentless stoppages — extended entertainment segments, a protracted fan shooting challenge, and lengthy timeouts engineered for commercial television — repeatedly killed whatever momentum the players had built on the floor.
The absentee list did not help matters either. LeBron James sat out citing foot and ankle discomfort. Anthony Edwards, arguably the event's biggest draw heading in, was ultimately ruled out with groin soreness and never left the bench for the final game. Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić, two of the most decorated players of their generation, received pointed criticism for bringing limited energy to the occasion. The league had set up conditions for maximum drama. Not every star chose to deliver.
🏆 2025 NBA All-Star Tournament — Full Results · Chase Center, San Francisco
Wembanyama: The Man Who Refused to Sleepwalk
If the NBA's new format needed a saviour, it found one in the most unexpected of places — a 22-year-old Frenchman from the San Antonio Spurs who arrived at the Chase Center with a singular purpose: to prove that elite basketball players can, in fact, try at the All-Star Game.
Victor Wembanyama had telegraphed his intentions all week. "I want to push the great players of this sport to play in the All-Star Game just as hard as I will," he declared ahead of the event, adding with characteristic boldness: "We'll see how it goes. But if they don't play hard, I'll do it without them." It was not idle talk.
From his very first possession with Team World, Wembanyama played as though the French national team's honour was on the line. He made four of his first five shots — half of them thunderous dunks — and scored 11 of his team's first 27 points in the opening game against Team Stars. He contested every possession with urgency, blocked shots that had no right to be blocked, and physically commanded the lane in a way that forced every other player on the court to raise their own standard. In the second game against a Kawhi Leonard-led Team Stripes, Wembanyama scored 11 points and registered a stunning pin-block on a Cade Cunningham layup attempt that drew gasps from the crowd.
Across the whole tournament, Wembanyama finished with 19 points in the final and a combined total that placed him as the clear best player on the night from Team World. He ended the afternoon with his teams having fallen short, but having gained something arguably more valuable than trophies: the total respect of every American player on the court, and the full attention of every fan watching at home.
Edwards Catches Fire — And a Rivalry Is Born
Nobody on the American side was going to let Wembanyama have all the fun. Anthony Edwards — the 24-year-old Minnesota Timberwolves guard and former No. 1 overall pick who has rapidly become one of the NBA's most magnetic personalities — responded to Wembanyama's opening salvo with the kind of performance that reminds everyone exactly why he is destined to be the face of this league.
In the pivotal first game between Team Stars and Team World, with the clock winding down and Wembanyama's team holding a narrow lead, Edwards drilled a clutch three-pointer with 14.3 seconds remaining to knot the score at 32–32 and force overtime. The Chase Center, which had spent much of the afternoon enduring the broadcast's endless stoppage time, erupted. The OT period operated on a first-to-five-points format, and it was Toronto Raptors forward Scottie Barnes who delivered the decisive three-pointer to give Team Stars the 37–35 win — but it was Edwards who had manufactured the moment that made overtime possible.
He set the tone, man. And it woke me up, for sure. They say they're the best players in the world — so beating them is the best feeling in the world.
— Anthony Edwards on Victor Wembanyama, post-game interview
In his on-court MVP interview, Edwards was magnanimous in his praise for his French rival, crediting Wembanyama directly for transforming the afternoon's energy. Yet he was equally unsparing in his critique of others. Without naming specific players directly — before going ahead and naming them anyway — Edwards pointed out that Luka Dončić and Nikola Jokić, both widely considered contenders for the league's MVP award, had not been visibly invested in competing. "No shade towards Luka and Jokic, but like, they two of the best players in the league — they not tryna play in the All-Star game." The quote went viral within minutes.
The Wemby–Edwards Rivalry: A Gift for the NBA's Future
Basketball rivalries are rarely manufactured by marketing departments. They emerge organically from the collision of ambition, talent, and temperament. Jordan vs. Bird. Magic vs. Isiah. LeBron vs. Durant. Each era births the defining duel it deserves — and if Sunday's All-Star Weekend offered any reliable preview of what the next decade of NBA basketball will look like, the league should feel very good about its future.
The Edwards–Wembanyama dynamic is everything a rivalry should be. They are a study in contrasts — Edwards, the exuberant, trash-talking American guard whose competitive fire burns so visibly it practically radiates off the television screen; and Wembanyama, the eerily composed French alien whose emotional investment is expressed not in words but in the thunderous ferocity of every blocked shot and the burning intensity behind his eyes when a defensive assignment goes wrong. Both players are in their mid-twenties. Both are projected to dominate the NBA for the next decade or more. Both arrived at Chase Center with something to prove.
This rivalry traces its roots to the 2024 Paris Olympics, where Team USA and France played one of the great gold medal games in recent memory. Wembanyama led the French side with conviction; Edwards was among the American stars who fought hardest to hold them off. Their Sunday afternoon rematch — compressed into 12-minute sprints with nothing but competitive pride on the line — carried echoes of that Olympic intensity, even within the often farcical structure of the new All-Star format.
The Kawhi Factor
A secondary subplot added further drama to the afternoon's proceedings. Kawhi Leonard, the LA Clippers star playing at home in the Intuit Dome market, was brought in as an injury replacement and proceeded to deliver the most aesthetically dominant individual performance of the entire weekend. Leonard scored 31 points on 11-for-13 shooting — including six three-pointers from seven attempts — in just 12 minutes of action to lead Team Stripes to a 48–45 victory over Team World. "That's what the home crowd wanted to see," Leonard said with understated calm after the game. Edwards, who had just enough time to observe Leonard warming up before the final matchup, offered a typically direct assessment: "I told him when we walked out for the last game, 'Hey, you need to chill out.'"
Did the New Format Work? The Verdict Is Split
The honest assessment of the 2025 NBA All-Star Weekend is that it succeeded and failed simultaneously, often within the same quarter of an hour. The competitive element — the thing the NBA desperately needed — was genuinely present in ways that have been absent from this event for years. All four games were decided by single digits or overtime. Wembanyama played with the fury of a man who treats every basketball game as life or death. Edwards turned in an MVP performance that will be replayed on highlight reels for years.
But the television product surrounding that competition? That was a different story. The extended breaks between stoppages, the lengthy in-game entertainment segments, the Kevin Hart-led emcee portions that stretched on well past their welcome — these elements consistently disrupted the rhythm that the players were trying to build. Draymond Green voiced what many were feeling from the commentary desk. Players like Trae Young echoed the sentiment in the post-game media availability. The NBA had solved one problem — competitive intensity — while creating a new one: an overcrowded broadcast structure that treated every moment of actual basketball as an interruption of the entertainment schedule rather than the other way around.
Interestingly, the players' own verdict on the format was more nuanced. Edwards endorsed repeating the same structure for the 2026 All-Star Weekend in Phoenix, arguing that the short games and separated rosters created conditions that forced genuine competition. Kawhi Leonard, perhaps more conservatively, suggested that a return to the traditional East-West format would also work now that players had demonstrated they were capable of caring about the result. The NBA's leadership will have plenty of data to analyze as it prepares the next edition.
What This Means for the NBA — and for Manchester United Fans
There is a broader sporting context worth acknowledging here. The NBA's All-Star struggles and reinventions reflect a universal challenge facing every major sport in the streaming era: how do you make an exhibition event feel meaningful when the audience has unlimited access to the real thing on demand? Manchester United fans — navigating their own era of transition, rebuilding, and searching for identity under new ownership — will recognise the feeling. Whether the answer lies in format tinkering or in simply finding the right individual who refuses to sleepwalk through the occasion, the solution ultimately comes down to people, not structures.
Victor Wembanyama and Anthony Edwards proved on Sunday that when the right people show up with the right mentality, even an imperfect framework can produce something genuinely special. The NBA did not get everything right with its 2025 All-Star revamp. But it got the most important thing right: it put the ball in the hands of two players who wanted desperately to win, and it got out of the way just long enough for something real to happen.
Final Thoughts
The 2025 NBA All-Star Weekend will be remembered not as the event that perfected the All-Star format, but as the one where Anthony Edwards won his MVP award, delivered a blistering post-game takedown of his league's most celebrated underperformers, and credited Victor Wembanyama — his rival, his foil, his measuring stick — for making the whole thing worth watching. That, in itself, is more than most All-Star Weekends can claim.
The next chapter of this rivalry will be written in the regular season, in the playoffs, and eventually in the Olympics. For now, all that is certain is that the NBA — for all its format struggles and broadcast overcrowding — has two extraordinary talents who genuinely want to compete with and against each other at the highest level. In a league desperate for the next great rivalry to capture the global imagination, Edwards and Wembanyama may well be exactly that.
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