UVA Basketball alum Ryan Dunn looked good in his surprise appearance in the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday night, scoring eight points on 3-of-5 shooting in 10 minutes in his Rising Star Challenge team’s 42-35 loss to Shaq’s OGs in the inaugural four-man All-Star Game Tournament.
The format, which, I don’t know if it will be back for the future, honestly, was thought up as a way to add some actual competitiveness to what had become, in recent years, an extended pregame shootaround.
The 2024 All-Star Game was won by the East by an absurd 211-186 score – the two teams shot a combined 56.4 percent from the floor, with 67 makes from three in (gulp!) 168 attempts from long-range.
The format change had the 24 All-Stars from the East and West split into three teams of eight players, with the fourth team in the tournament being the winner of a four-team tournament from Friday’s Rising Star Challenge, a showcase of rookie and sophomore players and G League All-Stars.
Dunn’s team won that tournament to make it to Sunday, giving the 2024 first-round pick and Phoenix Suns rookie a spot in the sport’s top showcase.
“That was probably one of the best weekends that I probably experienced,” said Dunn, who originally committed to Virginia as a walk-on in the 2022 recruiting class, and played himself from walk-on to first-round pick in two short years in the UVA Basketball program.
“This is something that I always wanted to be a part of, and to really be in this opportunity to play here and even play on today, on Sunday, like, All-Star Weekend, it was very great to be here,” said Dunn, who is averaging 6.5 points and 3.3 rebounds per game for the Suns, with 28 starts in his 49 appearances this season.
ICYMI
It was good as a UVA Basketball observer to see one of our guys playing on Sunday night on All-Star Weekend, but, being blunt about it, everything else about Sunday was just odd.
Not the actual game action – the teams in the three games Sunday night shot 50.8 percent from the field, and the box score counted a total of eight blocked shots and 23 steals in the limited action; for comparison, last year’s full game had a total of three blocked shots and 14 steals.
Meaning, they played defense, the actual game action was competitive, the guys were, dare I say it, trying.
The odd was more the way the NBA and TNT produced the TV show around the games.
The roster of color commentators talked down the format – most notable there was Draymond Green, a career 8.7 point-per-game, 6.9 rebound-per-game guy who nobody would have ever heard of or cared about if he’d been drafted by anybody other than Golden State.
Green used his unearned mic time to blast the inclusion of the Rising Stars in the tournament, which he denigrated as “the treat of watching the Olympic team play against a U-19 team.”
We also got a weird interlude with the YouTube-famous Mr. Beast, and a just-plain-weird 20-minute break in the championship game for a presentation to the “Inside the NBA” crew of Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal in which emcee Kevin Hart made it seem like their long-running pre- and post-game show was coming to an end, though it’s actually moving next year from TNT to ESPN.
I wouldn’t have tuned in at all if it weren’t for Ryan Dunn, who is actually 22, so, not U-19, being part of the night.
The growth we’ve seen in his game from last year at Virginia to his rookie season makes it seem like he could be on one of the main All-Star rosters a few years down the road, for what that’s worth.
Dunn said, in a postgame presser, that the Rising Stars-OGs game felt “competitive,” to a point where Dunn was part of a play that you wouldn’t have seen in an All-Star game anytime recently.
The OGs were up 39-35, and Kevin Durant, Dunn’s Phoenix teammate, got a long outlet pass from Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum after a rebound, and drove to the basket for what would have been the game-winning basket.
Dunn was there in between Durant and the hoop, and broke up the scoring attempt – the box score registered the play as a Durant miss, but Dunn clearly made hard contact.
“Oh yeah, I fouled him, I fouled him, like, three times,” Dunn told reporters after the game. “We were, I feel like we were in practice, we don’t call fouls, but yeah, just should’ve, probably should’ve let him get that one, but I’m a competitor. I was trying to win that game, but as long as he’s alright, long as we’re OK, I don’t got to deal with nobody calling my phone when we get back.”
We’re past the trade deadline, so Dunn is OK until the summer, at the least.
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Chris Graham
