While Yahoo’s Kelly Dwyer calls Sunday’s beauty pageant “easily the best NBA All-Star Game that I can remember”, and one local scribe hailed the Association’s community outreach efforts in New Orleans (“relentless tales of do-goodery” sneered one deep thinker who couldn’t even be bothered to watch the game), Uni Watch’s Paul Lukas used his Page 2 pulpit to critique a spectacle he calls “a total freakin’ disaster”.

Things looked relatively normal if the players were facing forward, but everything started going haywire once they turned sideways or backwards, because someone had the bright idea of using a two-tone format. Sometimes it looked like there were three or even four teams on the court at once.

Even worse, the East’s silver back looked a lot like the West’s white front, so it often looked like a player was being guarded by a member of his own team. There were also some surreal moments when two players came together and a composite third player seemed to form in between them. Was this the proverbial sixth man?

Hardwood Paroxysm
was on the scene in New Orleans this weekend, and let it be said that no one else in the mainstream media has published nearly as many candid photographs of Taylor Hicks.