2015 NBA All-Star Game

Result

MVP: Russell Westbrook

Box score

MVP: Russell Westbrook.

Bench (10+ points): Kyle Korver (21), Jeff Teague (14), Chris Bosh (10)

Bench (10+ points): Russell Westbrook (41), DeMarcus Cousins (14), Chris Paul (12), Damian Lillard (11)

Game context

The 2015 All-Star Game returned to Madison Square Garden for the first time since 1998, and Russell Westbrook made sure the marquee venue got a signature individual performance. The Oklahoma City Thunder guard scored 41 points to win his first career All-Star MVP award, highlighted by a torrid first half in which he scored 27 points in just 11 minutes of action, one of the most explosive scoring bursts in the event's history. He finished one point shy of Wilt Chamberlain's single-game All-Star scoring record of 42, set in 1962, continuing a stretch of near-misses at that mark that had also seen Kevin Durant, Blake Griffin, and Paul George come close in surrounding years, part of an escalating arms race of individual scoring performances as the game's overall pace and offensive freedom kept increasing. The West prevailed 163-158, extending its recent run of success in the event. The game also produced a family milestone: Marc Gasol, starting for the West, and his brother Pau Gasol, starting for the East, became the first pair of brothers to start together in the same All-Star Game, and the two even jumped for the opening tip against one another, a moment widely covered as a heartwarming first in the event's history. Stephen Curry, in the early stages of his ascent toward superstardom with the Golden State Warriors, led all players in All-Star fan voting with 1,513,324 ballots and started at guard for the West, a preview of the dominant, three-point-driven era he and the Warriors were about to usher in across the following several seasons. Injuries again reshaped the roster: Kobe Bryant earned a record 17th consecutive All-Star selection, extending a streak of selections that had begun in the late 1990s, but a season-ending shoulder injury kept him from actually playing, with DeMarcus Cousins stepping in as his injury replacement. The game's return to Madison Square Garden, one of the league's most storied venues and located in the media capital of New York City, gave the event an added sense of occasion after several years of being staged in newer arenas and stadiums around the country; the Garden's history hosting several earlier All-Star Games (1954, 1955, 1968, 1998) made the 2015 edition feel like a homecoming of sorts for the exhibition, even as the era's offensive identity — high scoring, minimal defensive resistance, and individual highlight-chasing — continued to diverge sharply from the lower-scoring, more competitive games the Garden had hosted decades earlier.

Sources

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