Howard’s party; an All-Star weekend request

Dwight Howard's All-Star party in Hollywood was kind of a bore. (Earl Gibson III/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES – Some All-Star weekend bullet points on this Saturday morning before I make my to the practice session shortly:

Crashing Superman’s All-Star party

• They say that in Los Angeles, the after-party is the real party, and that the after-party is the one that is truly hard to get into. Case in point: Through a friend here who knows people, I finagled my way into Dwight Howard’s Friday night party on a lot at Paramount Studios. I was excited! We drove through the iconic Paramount entrance gates and skipped right by a group of scantily clad women waiting in line to see if they might get in.

Tony Cornelius, the son of “Soul Train” founder Don Cornelius and the organizer of Howard’s party, greeted us warmly and a friendly p.r. exec led us into the main party. And then … very little exciting happened. Howard was there, giant and casual in a plaid shirt and in a roped-off section with people I didn’t recognize (John Wall would show up later and join Howard in the VIP area). He posed for some pictures and bobbed his head to the (really, really thumpingly loud) music but otherwise just stood around, chatting. There were go-go dancers (not naked!) gyrating atop raised platforms, and a life-sized mannequin of Howard and lots and lots of women in skimpy clothes, but there was nothing like the infamous LeBron James Vegas birthday party.

Then we went to Chris Brown’s party at a place called Boulevard3, and there was a red carpet packed with photographers and reporters talking with a female celebrity I didn’t recognize. No Chris Brown, no NBA guys — just lots of tables stacked with expensive bottles I certainly wasn’t going to touch. Kobe Bryant’s party, being held at the same place Saturday night, sounds like it will be the real deal.

Can we ditch the Rookie-Sophomore Challenge?

• It’s time to abolish the rookie-sophomore game. I realize this brands me as a cranky old man, at just 33, but the game is unwatchable. I get that it’s a fun showcase for the league’s young guys, and it is interesting to see how skilled these players are once removed from their regular NBA team. DeJuan Blair was hitting jumpers and floaters, Serge Ibaka hit a three-pointer and, of course, John Wall and Blake Griffin pulled that insane bounce pass alley-oop.

But the game, save for one or two monster highlights, is really just a succession of wide-open dunks and easy jumpers. And you realize pretty quickly that a dunk performed in an organized game but against no real defense loses its appeal after the fifth or six time. Oh, yay, DeMar DeRozan jammed home his fifth fast-break dunk. Yawn.

The game is something other than real basketball. So are the dunk contest and the three-point shootout, but those are meant to be something other than real basketball — skill contests outside the context of a game. It was fascinating to watch – as Kevin Arnovitz noted – how out of place guys like Taj Gibson and Landry Fields and Gary Neal were in the rookie-sophomore game. They are stud athletes, sure, but they are not Wall or Griffin or DeRozan, and their success in the NBA comes just as much from cutting and rotating and that sort of thing as it does from being a stud athlete. That is not to say Griffin and Wall don’t make those types of smart basketball plays, because they do, every night in the NBA.

The most popular replacement suggestion is a game between a team of NBA rookies and D-League All-Stars. The idea is that something would be at stake — the D-Leaguers would be playing to prove their worth as legit NBA prospects, while the rookies wouldn’t want to lose to D-Leaguers. I’m still not convinced it would work, if only because the default easy option in an exhibition game is for both sides to agree not to try their hardest so that no one really loses face.

But that idea is worth a shot. So are any number of more circus-like exhibition ideas people have tossed out — the defunct H.O.R.S.E. competition, a skills competition for big men, a one-on-one or three-on-three tournament. Anything but rookie-sophomore.