The big question going into NBA All-Star weekend: Will the new format work?

Red Auerbach once got ejected from an All-Star Game for arguing a call. Rick Barry and Bob Cousy each fouled out of All-Star Games twice, the only players who can say that. Dwyane Wade was whistled for the first flagrant All-Star foul after breaking Kobe Bryant's nose. As the story goes, Wade called Bryant not long after that 2012 game and attempted to apologize. Turned out, there was no need. Wade's recollection of what Bryant said? "Bro, I love it," Wade said in a conversation with Kevin Garnett, a clip that has been a social media standard ever since. The NBA doesn't want coaches to get kicked out, anyone to get into foul trouble or anyone getting hurt. But they've asked, begged and pleaded for years with players in an effort to get the All-Star Game get taken more seriously. And the latest solution is a radical one: a mini-tournament. Welcome to an All-Star format like none other: three games, no clock, first team to 40 points wins, eight-man rosters, and there's a reasonable chance that the team leaving San Francisco on Sunday as winners will have captured that title without having a single All-Star on its roster. "We went back to the drawing board," NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said. Here's the big question going into Sunday: Will it work? To be fair, there were skeptics when Silver added a play-in tournament to determine the final two playoff spots in the Eastern and Western Conferences; by all accounts, the play-in has been a smashing success. There were skeptics when Silver added an in-season tournament now called the NBA Cup; some players say they still don't totally understand the format, but the first two Cup final four weekends in Las Vegas have been big hits as well. Now, this. The NBA thinks players don't want to go to a 48-minute All-Star Game and play hard for a full game. Perfectly understandable. The proposed solution: short games, where nobody will have to play for long and there's little room for error since only 40 points are needed to win. Kevin Durant's first response? "I hate it. Absolutely hate it. Terrible," the Phoenix star and 15-time All-Star said when the league announced the plan in December, though he quickly noted that his initial reaction could have been worded differently. Perhaps he could have taken the route that perennial All-Star forward Anthony Davis, then of the Los Angeles Lakers and now of the Dallas Mavericks, took when he was asked in December what he thinks of the NBA's new plan. "I don't really like it," Davis said. "But we'll see how it goes this year and see if they change it again or not." And it could change again, possibly as early as next year. Some players want the traditional East vs. West format, although the league went back to that last year and it was a 211-186 game — all dunks and 3-pointers, pretty much — that broke records and forced the NBA to break the mold on the format. The NBA tried a target score approach; no clock in the fourth quarter and have the teams chase a set total to ensure that the game ends on a made basket. Some years it worked, some years not so much. They tried having playing captains pick the teams; again, success was mixed. Next up, the tournament. There is a prize pool of $1.8 million for the All-Star tournament. Each player on the All-Star champion team gets $125,000, each player on the runner-up team will get $50,000 and the players on the teams eliminated in the semifinals will each get $25,000. "I don't know if everyone understands how this is going to go," said Miami's Tyler Herro, who'll make his All-Star debut this weekend. "But everyone will want to win." There are four teams in the tournament: three teams picked by Shaquille O'Neal, Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley from the pool of 24 All-Stars, and the fourth will be the team that wins the Rising Stars event on Friday night. The Rising Stars players aren't All-Stars. Some aren't even in the NBA right now; there's a G League team in that event. And the Rising Stars winner could win the All-Star Game — meaning, yes, guys who aren't currently in the league could win the thing. Whichever way it shakes out, it will be a massive deviation from last year — when the East and West each scored at least 42 points in every quarter. Karl-Anthony Towns scored 50 points on his own last year; it'll take only 40 for a team to win a game this year. "Them trying to shake things up is expected and makes sense," Oklahoma City All-Star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. "But at the end of the day, it's going to come down to whether the players wanting to go at it, and I would love to see that. Love to be a part of that for sure, and hopefully it happens." Heat forward Kevin Love — who proudly says he took part in All-Star Games where players were competitive and even strategized in the locker rooms before games and at halftimes — doesn't know when the All-Star Game changed. He thinks it became part of the evolution within the game; more 3-pointers are shot than ever before and that, combined with everyone just treating it like an exhibition and not Game 7 of the NBA Finals, led to the defense-optional approach the league doesn't want to see anymore. "I'll tell you if this will work," Love said. "I'll tell you on Sunday."