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Dave McMenamin
SAN FRANCISCO — The NBA’s refreshed All-Star Game format finished with a familiar result for Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry: being presented with the Kobe Bryant Trophy as the All-Star MVP.
Curry scored 12 points in Team OGs’ 41-25 victory Sunday in the first-to-40 finale against the Global Stars, to win the league’s new round-robin tournament to cap of the festivities.
With Team OGs, coached by Shaquille O’Neal, up 23-15 in the championship game, Curry showed off his otherworldly shooting range by hitting a 3 from half court. It put his group up by double digits and ignited the Chase Center crowd, which cheered on their hometown star. With no clear-cut MVP for the night until Curry’s half-court heave, the guard’s teammates kept feeding him the ball — encouraging the league’s all-time 3-point leader to keep shooting — and he delivered two more 3s to give his team an overwhelming 39-21 lead.
Jayson Tatum finished it off with a dunk to hit the target score and bring his scoring total to 15 points.
“It was one of those little flurries, just having fun,” Curry said of his 3-point barrage. “The half-court shot, I was going to take one at some point. [Nikola] Jokic was picking me up at half court, which was hilarious.”
And the All-Star Game, which recently had been become a bit of a joke, with both teams combining to score 397 points in Indianapolis last year in a contest devoid of much competitive spirit, inched closer back toward respectability.
“I think it was a good step in the right direction to reinvigorate the game in some way,” Curry said of the format, which split the 12 Eastern Conference and 12 Western Conference All-Stars into teams of eight, going against a fourth team comprising eight first- and second-year players who won the Rising Stars game Friday night.
Curry received 12 of the 14 votes for MVP, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tatum receiving one apiece. It was the second All-Star MVP of Curry’s career. He won it in Cleveland in 2022, scoring 50 points (while shooting 16-for-27 from the 3-point line) to earn Team LeBron a 163-160 victory over Team Durant.
Curry acknowledged the new structure of the game is not conducive for an obvious MVP candidate to stand out.
“The format doesn’t allow for, like, a strong storyline to build,” Curry said.
Through the semifinal games, Gilgeous-Alexander — who scored 12 points on 5-for-5 shooting, including a clinching dunk to beat the Young Stars team 41-32 — was the lead MVP contender for the Global Stars. And Damian Lillard — who scored nine points on 3-for-5 shooting and ended it on a 27-foot pull-up 3 to win 42-35 over the Rising Stars — was in pole position for the OGs. Lillard, who won MVP last year by scoring 39 points for the East and going 11-for-23 from 3, said the award is more ephemeral now.
“Anytime you’re going to look at the MVP, you want to look at what jumped out,” Lillard said. “In this type of format, nobody is going to have 50 points, or 30 points is even going to be hard to do unless you shoot it every time and make every shot. But you look at what jumps out. When was the crowd the loudest? What jumped off the floor? And that’s probably who your MVP is going to be. So, watching the game, it was like, ‘I’m pretty sure Steph is going to win it.’ … I don’t know how many points he had, it couldn’t have been that much, but I think it was the eye test.”
Kyrie Irving, a fellow member of the OGs team, echoed Lillard’s endorsement of Curry.
“It’s easy to feed the hot guy, man and once he hit his first 3, basically every time we were looking for him,” Irving said. “When he’s in his hometown and playing in front of his home crowd, we all know what that means as an NBA player, as his peer. So, we’re not going to get in the way of that, man.”
Curry became the 15th player in league history to win All-Star MVP more than once and the 17th player in league history to win the award when his NBA team was hosting the event.
“The hosting experience was unbelievable,” Curry said when asked about the Warriors welcoming the All-Star events in both Oakland and San Francisco. “I’m not going to complain about being tired or exhausted. This is an honor and a blessing to be able to celebrate and share this beautiful Bay Area that’s been a part of my life for the last 16 years and the basketball history and culture that’s here and the amazing fans that are here and the impact that the game being here has had on both cities.”