1998 NBA All-Star Game

Result

MVP: Michael Jordan

The last All-Star Game before a full year was skipped in 1999 because of the NBA lockout.

Box score

MVP: Michael Jordan, his final All-Star Game as a Chicago Bull.

Bench (10+ points): Rik Smits (10), Reggie Miller (14), Glen Rice (16), Steve Smith (14)

Bench (10+ points): Eddie Jones (15), David Robinson (15), Nick Van Exel (13)

Game context

The 1998 All-Star Game, played February 8 at Madison Square Garden in New York, would prove to be the last All-Star Game for two full years — the entire 1999 All-Star Weekend, including the game itself, was wiped out by that year's NBA lockout, making this edition's storylines feel, in hindsight, like a closing chapter before an unplanned intermission. Michael Jordan, the game's leading vote-getter with 1,028,235 fan ballots, was named MVP for a third time, finishing with 23 points on 10-of-18 shooting, six rebounds, and eight assists as Larry Bird's Eastern Conference routed George Karl's Western Conference, 135-114, building an early 33-25 first-quarter lead it never relinquished. The game's most enduring storyline, though, belonged to a teenager making his debut. Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, at 19 years old, became the youngest All-Star in NBA history, and the game marked the only time in Jordan's career that the two would share an All-Star floor together — a symbolic changing-of-the-guard moment, with the retiring-in-a-year Jordan and the 19-year-old Bryant, who would go on to win the award that would eventually be renamed in his honor, both featured prominently. Bryant scored 18 points on 7-of-16 shooting with two three-pointers for the West. San Antonio's Tim Duncan also made his All-Star debut in this game, in his rookie season, quietly beginning a run that would eventually produce fifteen career All-Star selections of his own. Shaquille O'Neal, playing for the West as a Laker after missing the entire 1997 game because of injury, scored 12 points and grabbed four rebounds, while Gary Payton dished a game-high 13 assists. Grant Hill led the East with 15 points, and Shawn Kemp added 12 points and 11 rebounds. In an associated event that weekend, Lithuanian center Zydrunas Ilgauskas won MVP of the Rookie Game, an early instance of an international player headlining a marquee All-Star Weekend sub-event as the league's global talent pipeline continued to expand. With the 1998-99 lockout wiping out the following year's game entirely — the only time since the All-Star Game's 1951 debut that no game was held at all — this Madison Square Garden edition became, unexpectedly, a two-year bookend on the event, its Jordan-Bryant meeting only growing more historically resonant in retrospect once the games resumed in February 2000. Madison Square Garden's turn hosting this game was its fourth time doing so, following earlier editions in 1954, 1955, and 1968, cementing New York's status as one of the event's most frequent hosts even as the game itself, by 1998, had grown into a considerably larger multi-day spectacle than the more modest midseason exhibitions the Garden had hosted decades earlier. The Rookie Game held that same weekend, won by the East 85-80, gave fans an early look at Bryant, Duncan, and other rising talents on a secondary stage.

Sources

• Basketball-Reference — NBA All-Star Game History
• Basketball-Reference — NBA & ABA All-Star Game MVP (Kobe Bryant Trophy)
• Wikipedia — 1998 NBA All-Star Game
• Basketball-Reference — 1998 NBA All-Star Game Box Score