Ranking the All-Star Week Festivities from the 4 Major North American Sports

Three of the four major North American sports are fresh in people's minds when it comes to putting their best players on display.

Let's rank the four All-Star weeks from the NHL, NBA, NFL, and MLB to see which one reigns supreme as it currently is.

4. NFL Pro Bowl Games

What happened to the America I grew up in?

The NFL Pro Bowl used to be an actual football game where the best players at every position took the field with their respective conference and duked it out to see which one came out on top.

And when I say actual football game, I mean it. Just watch this hit from Sean Taylor (R.I.P.).

Now, the Pro Bowl is just a bunch of miscellaneous games and competitions. I haven't watched the Pro Bowl in years, especially since they started playing dodgeball and whack-a-mole (or maybe I'm thinking of tug-of-war).

Not to mention that the players in the actual Pro Bowl are an absolute joke now. Never forget two years ago when the NFL looked at all their options to provide an AFC alternate quarterback to Josh Allen and landed on Baltimore's Tyler Huntley.

When hard-nosed American football is reduced to 7th grade gym class, you've done something horribly wrong.

3. NBA All-Star Game/Skills Competition/Dunk Contest

Similarly to the NFL, I've not devoted any seconds of my time to watching the NBA All-Star Game in years, and I have never watched the Skills Competition - only embarrassing clips exposing the event for the snooze-fest that it is.

Speaking of, here's a clip Victor Wembanyama, the best young star in basketball, doing the Skills Competition.

The thing about basketball is that it's the most accessible sport of the four major American sports to play. All you need is a hoop and a ball. If you're a loner like me, you don't even need friends to play basketball.

The so-called "skills competition" is marketed as a marquee event, but your local librarian with a headband at the YMCA could do this stuff. Basketball skills are the same at every level of the game.

I didn't start playing organized basketball until college, but I'm an athlete, meaning even I can hit a 28-foot three pointer (I'm 5'8", so I have to or I'll get blocked into next week).

The main reason that the NFL is lower than the NBA is for that very reason - even great athletes can't read an NFL defense or line up against TJ Watt, but the NFL refuses to showcase their best doing so. At least the NBA tries to showcase their talent. They fail, but they try.

The Dunk Contest used to be great, but the problem is that every possible dunk has already been achieved, and there's just a G-League white guy who comes up to win the contest every year. There are only so many things you can jump over before dunking gets stale.

It's no less impressive, and even the best athletes couldn't do this, but we've been seeing these things for decades now. Basketball players have peaked and plateaued when it comes to dunking.

Can Mac McClung jump over my student debt and make it magically disappear? I'd appreciate that.

The NBA All-Star Game itself always used to be marked the same as the NHL for the reason that nobody played any defense and it was just logo threes and alley-oops the whole game.

I will say when they involved charity in the stakes for the game it made it much more compelling to watch, but now it's hardly a game. It's best-on-best, but nobody is playing their best. Now, Adam Silver has to beg players to try. That is laughable.

2. MLB All-Star Game/Home Run Derby

The thing about baseball is that it's impossible to play less than 100%. In the All-Star Game, pitchers don't dial back in an effort to not injure themselves. In fact, when baseball players don't play at full pace is when they get hurt.

The matchups in the All-Star Game have always been incredible. We get to see Paul Skenes vs. Aaron Judge, Pedro Martinez vs. the NL's Murderer's Row, and Randy Johnson vs. Derek Jeter. All-time greats in a 1v1 matchup.

It's an actual baseball game with the best players in the world, and it always has been.

Once upon a time, the MLB All-Star Game actually had major playoff implications. From 2005-2016, the league that won the All-Star Game was awarded home field advantage in the World Series.

Players didn't need the extra motivation, but they played hard anyway knowing it might eventually impact their chance at a championship. Meanwhile, LeBron James didn't play in the NBA All-Star Game because his foot was sore.

Baseball is a game of moments, and best-on-best matchups often breed memorable moments.

I can show this legendary clip from 2002 because the game is still the same 23 years later, and so many more great moments come out of it each season.

As for the Home Run Derby, I'm disgusted at what it has become. It used to be a display of power where the best sluggers in the sport would see how far they could hit home runs. There's something about marveling at a baseball landing in a place where baseballs were never meant to land.

Now, it's a timed event because people don't have an attention span anymore. It's turned the once electric Home Run Derby into an "endurance derby". Homers don't even go as far as they normally do in games, and it's more about not getting tired than hitting absolute nukes.

Chicks don't care how many times you can bench 95lbs. They wanna see a half a ton on the bar.

This year's Derby had a fantastic, cinematic finish, but there shouldn't be a clock in baseball. That's the beautiful thing about the sport. For that, you know what's number one.

1. NHL Four Nations Faceoff

Understand that if this was 2024, baseball would be on top by a long shot, but the NHL went from having All-Star festivities akin to the NFL and NBA and turned it up to an eleven with the Four Nations Faceoff.

I started playing hockey in college and am completely convinced I could replicate Nikita Kucherov's performance. I'm a novice hockey player, but I can do this. It's a good thing the NHL moved on from, well, whatever this is.

Real people really thought that the players wouldn't care. Here's me laughing at you in red, white, and blue. When hockey players put on their country's colors, the ice turns into a battlefield.

Every man has the irrational desire to bleed out in solitude in the snow, and every single player in the 4 Nations Faceoff has pretty much done just that in the tournament.

Of the round robin games, two went to overtime and all but USA vs Finland were tense in the closing minutes.

We got to see the G.O.A.T. line with McDavid, Crosby, and MacKinnon, the super smash Tkachuk brothers, and the renewed Scandinavian rivalry all in one week.

And the best part is that the closing act is sure to be the best, and we haven't even seen it yet.

Hockey hit it out of the park with this decision, and hopefully this gets more eyes on the sport. The hesitancy of the masses to get into hockey is largely due to the NHL's marketing failure and the lack of media personalities amongst the game's stars.

But when you put a country's flag on a jersey, it gets people to watch. And if this is what first-time hockey watchers are tuning into, they're probably going to stick around.

International hockey is here to stay with the NHL, and it's the best decision the league has made in a long time.

Where would you rank the four major sports when it comes to their respective All-Star festivities? Tell us on Twitter/X and Facebook!