The best part of the NBA All-Star Weekend 2024 won’t return in 2025.
On Thursday, the league announced that there will be no NBA-WNBA shootout at this year’s All-Star Saturday. Last year’s event saw Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors defeat Sabrina Ionescu of the New York Liberty in a thrilling 3-point contest that was seemingly a huge benefit to both the men’s and women’s game.
However, neither side reportedly wanted a rematch, leading to Thursday’s news.
“We weren’t able to land on a plan we thought would raise the bar off of last year’s special moment,” NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement. “We all agreed not to proceed and will instead keep the focus on All-Star Sunday’s new format.”
The idea was essentially dead once Caitlin Clark reportedly declined to participate in a proposed expanded format that would have paired her and Ionescu against Curry and Klay Thompson. Clark, through her agency, stated in January that she “wants her first 3-point contest to be at WNBA All-Star in Indianapolis this summer,” a decision that WNBA star Cameron Brink publicly applauded.
With Clark out, any hopes of a Curry-Ionescu rematch quickly faded. According to The Athletic’s Joe Vardon and Anthony Slater, neither player was particularly interested.
League sources with direct knowledge of the negotiations said Curry and Ionescu were not interested in a rematch. They wanted to expand the competition to include WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark, and potentially Curry’s former teammate Klay Thompson. But when Clark, through a statement issued by her sports agency in January, declined to participate, saying she “wants her first 3-point contest to be at WNBA All-Star in Indianapolis this summer,” it all but doomed the men-against-women shooting contest.
That didn’t stop the NBA from making a last-ditch effort to salvage the event as late as Wednesday, per The Athletic, but the league failed to get both sides on board. There was even discussion of shifting the competition to Sunday during a break in the reformatted All-Star Game, but that idea never gained traction.
And just like that, the most exciting addition to All-Star Weekend in years disappears — not with a bang, but with a half-hearted shrug.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.