This Week's Sports Hero & Zero: William Byron, NBA All-Star Weekend

by Julian Spivey

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Hero

​William Byron, who arguably had the best 2023 season of any NASCAR Cup Series driver with his series-high six wins, began the 2024 Cup Series season on Monday, February 19 winning the sport’s biggest race, the Daytona 500.

​Byron’s first career Cup Series win came at the track in 2020 in the fall race but he’s never had any success in the “Great American Race” before Monday. In fact, in six previous Daytona 500 starts Byron had never finished the race.

Byron came up as something of an unusual prodigy in NASCAR learning how to drive more at first on a simulator in his home than at the race track, as most drivers do. He tore up the Craftsman Truck Series in 2016 at age 18 winning seven races, nearly one-third of that series’ schedule. The next year in the Xfinity Series at 19 he would win four races and finish in the top 10 in 22 of 33 races. He was then moved up to the Cup Series, maybe a bit too quickly in the eyes of some, for the 2018 season at age 20. Byron struggled in his first two Cup seasons failing to win a race and recording just 17 top 10s over 72 races in Hendrick Motorsports equipment, so the best the sport has to offer.

That first win came in 2020. He would win another race in 2021 at Homestead-Miami Speedway and then in 2022 finally had his first multiple-win season with wins at Atlanta Motor Speedway and Martinsville Speedway.

His 2023 season, where he led the sport with six wins, felt like it came out of nowhere. But at age 25 maybe he finally had gotten comfortable with the equipment and his talent level reached that of his competitors.

Now, in the first race of the 2024 Cup Series season, Byron has won the biggest race of them all and has become the first driver to clinch a spot in the 2024 NASCAR Playoff field. His six wins from 2023 would be pretty hard to top, but at the moment there’s no better driver in the NASCAR Cup Series than William Byron. 

Zero

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​This past weekend, February 17-18, seems like the one where NBA fans have finally become fed up with the NBA All-Star Weekend.

The All-Star festivities on Saturday night in Indianapolis got off to a great start with a fun three-point contest, an event that seems unbreakable, with Milwaukee Bucks All-Star guard Damian Lillard defending his 2023 title in a tight-fought battle against Karl Anthony-Towns (Minnesota Timberwolves), Trae Young (Atlanta Hawks) and Tyrese Haliburton (Indiana Pacers). Then came the new event many NBA and WNBA fans alike were looking forward to – the three-point shootout between all-time NBA three-point leader Stephen Curry (Golden State Warriors) and Sabrina Ionescu (New York Liberty), who scored a record 37 points in the 2023 WNBA three-point contest (Curry held the NBA record at 31). In a fun competition (except for TNT’s Kenny Smith’s commentary that drew the ire of many, especially female fans) Curry defeated Ionescu 29-26.

Hopefully, the NBA star vs. WNBA star aspect of NBA All-Star Saturday Night continues into future years.

What earned NBA All-Star weekend the “Sports Zero” of the week was everything that came next. For the second year in a row the NBA Slam Dunk Contest was won by a player who isn’t even technically in the NBA but in the league’s minor leagues known as the NBA G League. Max McClung, on the Orlando Magic’s minor league team, defeated three actual NBA players for the second year in a row. McClung now has almost as many Slam Dunk Contest trophies (2) as NBA games played in his career (4).

Many have long bashed the Slam Dunk Contest for a lack of quality, excitement and array of dunks – which is understandable but also somewhat unfair as there are only so many kinds of dunks that can be done after 40-plus years of dunk contests. My biggest issue has been a lack of star power in the event, which was alleviated a bit this year with Boston Celtics All-Star Jaylen Brown taking part in the event and then absolutely embarrassing himself with a lackluster performance that reminded us why most All-Stars stay far away from the event.

I don’t want to see the NBA Slam Dunk Contest eliminated but I’m also not sure there’s any way to fix it.

The more concerning aspect of NBA All-Star weekend for many fans was the effort-free All-Star game itself on Sunday night (February 18). The league went back to the traditional Eastern Conference vs. Western Conference format this season after many years of having a superstar from each conference draft teams consisting of all of the game’s All-Stars. The league also went back to the traditional four quarters instead of having a certain number to hit after three quarters.

But it was clear from the start that there was no real effort to play defense by either squad, which has become more and more the case over the years, and many of the players just took the opportunity to see who could hit the most three-pointers and from how far they could. It was kind of like watching a shootaround with the occasional fancy pass or dunk thrown in.

The word “pride” was thrown around a lot by fans on social media perturbed by the effort given during the game, as in “these players need to take more pride in their effort.” But times have changed and you don’t have the kind of athletes out on the court anymore who truly despise each other and don’t want to lose to them, even in an exhibition game. How does one enforce something that isn’t truly mandatory? The NBA All-Stars play an 82-game season where they try to give their all and then those who make the postseason spend another two months trying to win a title. They just want to have fun on All-Star weekend (if they even want to be there at all). They don’t want to worry about potential injury by playing at full speed. So, they turn it into a Harlem Globetrotters performance.

I don’t think there’s any way to fix that way of thinking. It’s just come to a point where we fans have to determine if the game is worth watching or if we’d rather do anything else on a random Sunday night in February every year. On Sunday, I held in as long as I could, but by the fourth quarter, I was ready for anything else.