Chris Paul and Victor Wembanyama were disqualified from the NBA Skills Challenge after putting their own flair on the event.
As the league grapples with declining viewership, Adam Silver and his cohort seem to think that NBA All-Star Weekend is the key to regaining some respect, and players have been pressured and urged to take the event seriously.
So far, it has mostly fallen on deaf ears, although two stars, Chris Paul and Victor Wembanyama, wanted to win the Skills Challenge, which is generally the least important of the exhibition events.
Last year, Wembanyama played alongside Paolo Banchero and Anthony Edwards on “Team First Picks” and lost in the first round when Edwards insisted on dribbling, passing, and shooting with his left hand. This year, Wembanyama was out for blood and wanted to win.
He and Paul, on “Team San Antonio Spurs,” opted to do everything they could to win. A part of the Challenge requires players to either make one 3-pointer or take three of them, and Wembanyama and Paul realized they could intentionally miss much faster than they could make a shot, and displayed their alternate tactic to boos and jeers from fans.
Immediately after the spectacle, the media swarmed around Wembanyama, who made two claims.
First, he insists that it was his idea to use their unorthodox approach and that Paul was just along for the ride.
Second, he claims that he asked the officials if he could miss shots intentionally and they said yes before folding to the pressure from the fans at Chase Center. Draymond Green, weirdly, corroborates the story.
Chris Paul didn’t speak to the media after the event, although he finally opened up about how he remembers it.
“It was an idea or whatnot,” he told Taylor Rooks. “It didn’t work out. They did say that it was OK to do that.”
Paul thinks it was more funny than anything. He has participated in five Skills Challenges, although he has never won one, and he likely missed his last chance this year.
“It was a wild situation,” he admitted.
While officials quickly ended Paul and Wemby’s bid to win the Skills Challenge, Paul has been around long enough to have some connections.
Paul was the president of the NBA Players Association for nine years and has long served on the league’s competition committee, where he has befriended members of the Commissioner’s Office, who seemed pleased that someone was taking the event seriously and wanted to win.
“I got a bunch of texts from people like really, really high in business and stuff,” he said. “And they was like, ‘Well, I’m just glad you tried something different.’”
While it’s unlikely that the league will invite Wembanyama to participate in his third Skills Challenge next season, he’s too bright of a star for the NBA to stop from being a fixture in All-Star Weekend, and an invite to either the Dunk Contest or 3-Point Contest should arrive before next year’s event in Los Angeles.
