Rick Barry is honored to be part of the festivities for the 2025 NBA All-Star Game, but isn’t quite sure what to make of an event for which he was once named Most Valuable Player.
“It’s a shame what’s happened to it,” Barry said in a recent phone interview. “For whatever reason, the players don’t take it seriously, which is sad. It would be nice to see these guys, as great as they are, playing their hardest to win the damn game.”
When Stephen Curry takes the floor with the starters on Feb. 16 at Chase Center, he’ll become the third Warriors player to participate in an NBA All-Star Game played in the Bay Area.
The last time was on Jan. 10, 1967, when Barry and center Nate Thurmond starred in a 135-120 upset win for the West at the Cow Palace in Daly City. The only other time the game was played in the Bay Area was in 2000 at the Coliseum Arena in Oakland. The Warriors were 12-35 at the break en route to a 19-63 season and didn’t have a player named to the team.
Forward Antawn Jamison was invited to the slam dunk contest, but didn’t participate because of a knee injury.
Barry, 80, has fond memories of the Cow Palace even if it wasn’t the most opulent of venues. It opened in 1941 and was known as the California Livestock Pavilion until 1944 before the name change. Barry scored 38 points as the West snapped a four-game losing streak to the East, which won 137-94 the previous year in Cincinnati.
The Warriors would later win two home playoff games at the Cow Palace in 1975 over the Washington Bullets — with Barry scoring 38 and 36 points — because the Coliseum Arena was booked for an Ice Follies performance.
“They didn’t have collapsible rims in those days,” Barry said. “The rims on those baskets – I called them sewer pipes – were very forgiving and I had some big games at the Cow Palace.”
Barry was awarded the MVP trophy by NBA Commissioner J. Walter Kennedy that evening but maintains the award should have gone to Thurmond, a longtime teammate and close friend who passed away in 2016 at age 74.
“It was special for me to have been fortunate enough to be MVP, but they should have two awards and they’re not necessarily the same – MVP and a Most Outstanding Player,” Barry said. “That game, I think I would have gotten the Most Outstanding Player because of my scoring. But I thought Nate was the MVP, playing against a front line of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Jerry Lucas.”
Thurmond finished with 16 points and 18 rebounds in 42 minutes, with Barry hitting 16 of 27 shots on the “sewer pipe” rims and scoring 38.
Even for an All-Star Game the event was star-studded to the extreme. Of the 20 players on the two 10-man rosters, 17 were eventually inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame. A dozen were named to the NBA’s all-time top 50 players in 1996 – Barry, Thurmond, Chamberlain, Russell, Lucas, Elgin Baylor, Dave DeBusschere, Hal Greer, John Havlicek, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson and Lenny Wilkens.
“It was a hell of a game, just an amazing array of talent on both of those teams,” Barry said.
The common thread on both teams was that each side took the game seriously rather than as an exhibition.
“It’s a different world, like night and day,” Barry said. “Our game was a very serious basketball game. It was an honor to be on the team, have an opportunity to play, and we wanted to win very badly.”
Badly enough that East coach Red Auerbach, who had given up his job as Celtics head coach to Russell that season, was ejected from the game for arguing with officials. The previous year, Barry, then a rookie out of Miami, played 17 minutes and fouled out.
Barry remembers a $2,000 payout per player for the winning team, with $1,000 for the losers. There was a paid attendance of 13,972, and box seats could be purchased for $5 and $6.
There was a banquet for the players the night before but there were no skills or dunk contests and the game was a no-frills production by Sports Network Incorporated which was available to local affiliates.
For the 2025 game, Barry will be in town Wednesday night, participate in a celebrity pickleball event – he’s a nationally ranked player in his age group – conduct a shooting clinic and take in the sights and sounds.
“I’ll be running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” Barry said.
As the game has regressed in terms of competition, the NBA has tinkered with the format. This year will feature four teams in a “mini-tournament” format, with players drafted by TNT analysts Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith with a fourth team — the winner of Friday’s “Rising Stars” game — coached by Candace Parker.
The game reverted to an East-West format last year and the result was a 211-186 win by the East with little or no defense being played and an emphasis on showmanship rather than basketball. The previous four years, selected players participated on a team picked and captained by LeBron James against another team that featured either Kevin Durant or Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Curry served as the coach opposite Team LeBron in 2018. In 2022, Curry, playing for Team LeBron in Cleveland, was joined Barry as a Warriors’ MVP by scoring 50 points in 36 minutes.
“I’m not sure how it’s going to work,” Barry said of this year’s format. “Maybe the players that play against the Rising Stars team will not want to have those guys beat them and they’ll play seriously. It’s going to be interesting to see.”