The NBA All-Star Game has never been short on spectacle, but this year’s edition? Well, that’s an entirely different story.

Was it a disaster? Absolutely.

An irredeemable mess? That’s how Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder saw it.

But who’s truly to blame for this debacle? For Stephen A. Smith — no matter what Draymond Green might say — the culpability lies squarely with the players. And he wasted no time making his point on Monday’s edition of First Take, calling out the lack of effort while stopping just short of tearing apart the new format.

In not mincing words, Smith suggested that, at their core, the changes were necessary and an embarrassment to the players—an admission that the league had to resort to desperate measures just to get them to show any semblance of effort.

“It was a damn shame that the league had to implement those things in order to get it to the point,” he said.

Smith’s criticism wasn’t just about the changes but about what they represented. Despite the success of the new format, the underlying issue was the glaring lack of respect and effort from the players. The All-Star Game should be one of the season’s highlights, but for years, it had become little more than a sideshow.

“All-Stars needs to be a part of All-Star Sunday, and the fact that you had to add somebody else, to me, is egregious,” Smith explained. “It’s not the fault of the league… It’s the fault of the players. If the players, the All-Stars that have been picked, had shown up on an annual basis and treated it with the respect it deserves, it wouldn’t have been necessary for the format change. So my point is that even though it worked, why did it work? It worked because we’re sitting here and saying, ‘Guess what? They showed more effort,’ which is an indictment against the effort they had been showing for the previous several years.

“That is the egregious part of all of this — the fact that it was necessary. We’re sitting here on a Monday after All-Star Weekend and applauding the fact that we saw additional effort, the kind of effort that you see them putting forth when they’re simply working out in the summertime. That’s all anybody was asking for to begin with. And it’s a damn shame that it took rookie All-Stars showing up to invade the proceedings on a Sunday evening to get what they should’ve been giving us for years.”

So if it was entertaining — and it worked — why didn’t Smith spend Monday’s First Take celebrating that fact?

“We’re not celebrating it because the people that were there that provoked this weren’t All-Stars,” Smith said. “What you want to see is the All-Stars. But it literally took non-All-Stars — babies just arriving in the league — to get on the court and threaten to upset and usurp these brothers to show the kind of effort they should’ve been showing for years.

“That’s the point. It’s not an indictment on them. It’s not an indictment against the league. But, it is an indictment against the perennial All-Stars, who everybody wants to see — who the fans, the media, the coaches everybody voted in. It is an indictment against them that that’s the most effort they’ve shown All-Star Weekend in years.”

In not beating around the bush, Smith made the conversation solely about the players — not the NBA itself.

For better or worse, the All-Star Game has never been just about flashy performances or new formats—it’s about the players showing up with the effort and respect that the media and fans alike feel it deserves.

When it takes rookies to spark that energy, the league has a serious problem.

As long as the game requires these drastic measures to get the best from the stars, the NBA will continue to miss the mark, and the fans will continue to be shortchanged. And at its core, Smith’s point boils down to the league needing its All-Stars to act like All-Stars, and anything less isn’t good enough.