It is obvious that everyone hated this all-star game, and to be fair I do not remember that many games in the last 10 years that excited me like the good old days. However, people are forgetting that while the old days didn't have this many "let him score" moments, it wasn't really a hardcore defence like the league was doing. Remember, those days were the days of hand checking and good defence, but at the same time people didn't shoot from the half court like Dame did, if you were in 99' and tried half court shot, nobody would have defended either. And we had self-oops in those days too. So, while I do believe that it got worse, it was never awesome to be fair, all-star games were always more "fun" oriented than regular season games, but those days defence was harder, so when you do softer defence in all-star games, the defence was still on par with regular season defence of today. Also, one important thing is that the dunk contest was seen as much more important on those days, I still think the three point contest is fun, but the dunk contest got worse, so that really took a lot of air from the weekend as well. We no longer have Vince, Kobe, r.josh, t-mac type of dunkers, now we have G-league dunkers. So when you combine that, with less defensive league and even less defence on all-star, it started to look worse.