The NBA All-Star Game is magnificently inconsequential, a forty-eight minute glimpse into what it would be like if the Warriors compelled Steph Curry to report to Bizarro Summer League, which isn’t an uninteresting prospect right up until the moment Steph cruises down the court and—right, okay, he does hit those shots even when people are actually trying to guard him; this is quickly going to get monotonous. The contest is basketball rendered uncanny by the subtraction of crucial elements like effort and stakes. It’s got a hungover, Player Two Has Abandoned His Playstation Controller vibe to it, probably because some of the players are hungover. It doesn’t call out for reform because there’s really no fixing what’s fundamentally screwed up about it—why are we doing this?—and so it simply persists as a strange, decadent, almost charmingly pointless exercise that Chris Rock may or may not sit courtside for. 

So, whatever: instead of East vs. West, the All-Star Game is going to be captains selecting teams pickup style this year. That’s a fine premise that would play out fascinatingly if anyone involved could be bothered to try. (The only solution to that problem is letting the players bet cases of beer and Brentwood real estate.) Not to bag on the idea or argue that the NBA should institute some overreactive Major League Baseball-esque This One Counts measure, but there’s just no saving this thing. It’s unavoidably going to be trailer-as-cinema, sauce-as-entree.

With that said, the NBA is getting something wrong about this new format: they should put the draft on TV. This is an unusual development, that we in the sports-loving audience need to coax a league into peddling yet another sports-adjacent spectacle to one of their broadcast partners. Commissioners usually love doing stuff like this, which is why the NFL Draft somehow lasts three days now, and why the NBA Lottery—which is literally just a guy in a suit reading the names of franchises in a certain order while Magic Johnson or whoever sits behind a game show podium and gives a thumbs up—is a live event. If there’s a way a sports league can make a buck putting something vaguely dramatic on ESPN, they almost always do it.

So why is the NBA leaning toward keeping the All-Star draft off-camera? It has to do with a peculiar squeamishness all massive corporations have toward conflict and risk. While the NBA inarguably benefits (and probably secretly loves, in a bottom line-watching kind of way) from, say, Russell Westbrook straight up despising Kevin Durant, they prefer to let Instagram and Twitter react to that stuff rather than actively push it themselves. They don’t mind Russ yapping at KD on the court, but if he were ice-grilling him at a TV event too nakedly assembled to make something like that happen—there would be nothing truly wrong with it, but Adam Silver and people like him don’t ascend to their stately perches without honing a superior sense of the tacky, and keeping far away from it. The guiding question in a sports league executive’s career generally isn’t What Would Be Fun? or What’s The Right Thing To Do?, but What Makes Me Seem The Most Like A Senator In A Really Boring Movie?

Of course, if enough people clamor for a live broadcast of the draft, we’ll probably get one. If not this year, then perhaps the next. The NBA isn’t populist, but it can be cajoled. It’s helpful to the cause that LeBron James and John Wall have recently come out and said that their egos aren’t so fragile that they can’t handle a little schoolyard drama being beamed into sports bars and living rooms. They get it. They’re overcompetitive weirdos and know that their weird overcompetitiveness and its discontents is part of what makes them and their sport entertaining.

Were the NBA persuaded, they would have on their hands a new most intriguing part of the whole All-Star Weekend exhibition, if nothing nearly as attention-commanding as a close-run playoff series. But this isn’t about the NBA’s business—which, it bears mentioning in this climate in which we increasingly talk about everything we like as if it were a product we owned stock in, we should absolutely not care about—so much as the league more fully acknowledging what it is and and why people bother with it. We’re here for the beautiful basketball and the soul-salving redemption stories that play well in a soft-focus pregame feature, but we’re also here for a little unpleasantness and beef and enmity. Everyone knows that, the folks in the league offices included. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to sanction it, to some degree. It’s not like LeBron and Kyrie are going to bring chains and copper pipes to the All-Star Selection Ceremony (brought to you by Sprite)—though, man, it would make for fantastic television if they did.