The NBA announced that Kawhi Leonard has been named an All-Star by league commissioner Adam Silver. Leonard was added to the player pool in order to satisfy the necessary number of players for the league’s USA vs. World format.<\/p>\n
The new format will consist of three teams of eight players: two teams made up of American players, with one “World” team of the league’s international talent. Of the 24 original All-Stars selected, there were only 15 American players, as Karl-Anthony Towns will play for the World team. Adding Leonard now brings the total to 15 American players.<\/p>\n
The players who will compete on each team will be revealed Tuesday night ahead of the Dallas Mavericks vs. Boston Celtics game.<\/p>\n
This marks another overhaul of the All-Star Game format. The league has toyed with different versions of the event, with last year marking the first turn at a round-robin tournament. The tournament style will remain the same this year, with three games being played to decide a winner of the weekend’s events. However, how the matchups will be determined has yet to be announced.<\/p>\n
Leonard was considered one of the biggest snubs when All-Star announcements were made, as he’s having his best season since his first year in L.A. He’s averaging a career high 27.6 points, 6.1 rebounds and 3.6 assists and is leading the league in steals at 2.1 a game. He’s also been fairly durable this season, having played in 73% of the Clippers’ games this season. That’s a major bounce back from a season ago where he only appeared in 37 games, which he’s set to match that total with the next appearance he makes.<\/p>\n
Source: RhinoEasy News<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The NBA announced that Kawhi Leonard has been named an All-Star by league commissioner Adam Silver. Leonard was added to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":847,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}