Victor Wembanyama, Chris Paul’s hilarious disqualification from 2025 NBA Skills Challenge exposed the event

Victor Wembanyama, Chris Paul’s hilarious disqualification from 2025 NBA Skills Challenge exposed the event

It was another disappointing NBA All-Star Saturday night. Well, actually, for it to be disappointing, you needed to have some level of expectations for it. I didn’t, thus making it par for the course because it wasn’t good.

But there was a very funny moment to come out of it. In the Skills Competiton–the first of three events of the evening–Chris Paul and Victor Wembanyama tried to circumvent the rules for the relay race, which includes an array of obstacles that players must race through.

Part of it included taking a max of three wing 3-pointers, mid-range shots and corner 3s over a spinning obstacle aimed to distract the shooter. Of course, if you make one, you advance to the next obstacle. But nothing in the rules said anything about intentionally missing shots for the sake of time.

At least so Paul and Wembanyama thought, until they were disqualified without making “three valid” shot attempts, per the broadcast.

Team Cavs’ Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley pointed fun banter at them after when asked about their sly tactics.

While there wasn’t anything written in stone about intentionally missing shots that we, the audience, knew of, it pointed out one very fatal flaw: The only “skill” you really need is knowing how to pass … and that may even be a stretch.

Even the chest passes weren’t very far away, and the one moving target was operating at 0.0001 MPH while being two feet away from the players bouncing passes into it.

You don’t have to make shots to advance. All you have to do is shoot three from each area as fast as you can. If you make one, great! But if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world because it’s not a requirement.

Thus, it’s not really a skills competition. You don’t have to do anything incredibly worthwhile to win the event, even though knowing how to run, dribble and shoot help. But it’s not a necessity–which shouldn’t be the case if the competition’s a “Skills” challenge. You don’t have to earn anything unless you mess up a 15-foot pass.

Once again, the NBA’s vomiting on themselves with these formats. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

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