Was Steph Curry Opposed to Televising First All-Star Draft?
By Bobby Burack
The NBA All-Star Game has a fresh new format set to debut Sunday, yet the NBA fans are still not satisfied They instead wanted one more change, and that was to see a live draft of the two captains, LeBron James and Steph Curry, selecting their teams.
One of the people pushing the hardest for this is the host of The Jump, Rachel Nichols. During her interview today with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, she tried not to let him get away with a non-answer.
Silver explained why it was not televised, at the 1:20 mark:
Silver said on the Jump, when asked about televising the draft:
"“I agree with Steph, he was the one who said ‘give us a break, we changed the format for the first time. Let’s see how it goes and then we can talk about televising it.'”"
Last month, Steph said to USA Today’s Sam Amick on the draft:
"Yeah, we’ve had a lot of discussion around that, and obviously there’s a lot of people in favor of watching (the selections) live, and there’s also people that understand the reasoning behind why it’s not this year.” … “This is a new format. It’s been a certain way for so long … we’ve still got training wheels on it and we’ll figure out how to make it better from here.”"
Even if players were opposed, a better question is, why didn’t the most powerful man in the NBA — LeBron — force it to be on TV? He said he wanted it televised. Either way, this was a huge disappointment, and we can only hope it’s changed next year (if they keep this format).