Trae YoungJoe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images
The league’s new all-LED floor, which was used for the celebrity game and All-Star Saturday Night, was absolutely wild.
The possibilities with it are endless, but shooting on a lime green, luminescent floor sure seems like it would be distracting.
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“I was running from, I think, the corner to the wing, and as I was running, I was trying to look down to where the line is, and there was like some stuff going on,” three-point shootout winner Damian Lillard said. “I don’t think it really distracted me that much from shooting. I think everybody kind of tuned it out at some point, but I’m sure everybody had a moment where something happened and it threw them off a little bit.”
Whatever those moments were, like Lillard said, the shooters did seem to push through them. Multiple players got to 26 points (out of a possible 40) in the first round. And the one or two points that the floor may have cost a few competitors were worth the trade-off.
The video presentations on the floor were spectacular. In the dunk contest, a trail of flame followed Jaquez on his first dunk. Jaylen Brown had multiple tributes on the floor (one to Dominique Wilkins and one to a former high school teammate) during his dunks.
Live stats were updating on the side of the floor that wasn’t in use. During the relay portion of the skills challenge, a live interactive trail showed how quickly previous teams had gotten through the course.
During one break, fans got a chance to run and dribble on an interactive, moving raceway.
For the foreseeable future, this still feels like more of a novelty. It’s great for one-offs like All-Star Saturday, but after seeing it in action, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of it one day being the floor for an actual game.
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