The N.B.A. All-Star Game day commenced ninety minutes before tipoff with a press conference by a player who wasn’t playing, Kobe Bryant. He has a fractured bone in his knee. Bryant has been an All-Star sixteen times; in a quarter of those games he was named M.V.P.—a tie for the record set by Bob Pettit. This is the first time he has not been able to play. In this sense he was representative of the theme of the whole All-Star Weekend: a league in transition. David Stern, the league’s commissioner for thirty years, had ceded the role to Adam Silver, his bald, bespectacled deputy and chosen successor, for whom this game was a kind of débutante ball.

Bryant walked into the media room to face the phalanx of press wearing a white button-down shirt, open at the collar, and a suit of some elusive color in the vicinity of beige and yellow. The color projected calmness, neutrality to the point of invisibility, and leisure, as though he had come to the Big Easy in order to take it easy. But Kobe Bryant is not a take-it-easy guy. He is the most famous player in a league of very famous players. To the extent that he is associated with calm, it is usually the kind that manifests itself under pressure.

Bryant fielded questions that ran the full gamut of journalistic approaches: provocative (“Do you think you will ever play again?” “I hope so.”), banal (“What do you think about your new shoes?” “I love them.”), softball (“How has the league changed most since you arrived in it?” “The global impact. When [Stern] came on, in 1984, I was six, living in Italy. Games all of a sudden started becoming televised.”), stupid/obnoxious/provocative (“Not that I am suggesting anything, but do you have a retirement plan?”), and interesting (“What’s up with all these injuries, and what could the new commissioner do about them?”)—the last two, in fairness, asked by the same guy.

His response to the retirement question was a brief bit of meandering stream of consciousness that ended, “I don’t want the rocking chair before the game. It would drive me crazy. I’ll probably just pop up and vanish.” The remark provoked the room to laughter, but I thought the line was kind of spooky.

Did “pop up and vanish,” simply reflect his wish to be elsewhere in that moment? Or was he fantasizing about a Salinger-esque retreat from staged events like this one, where he is required to face an armada of needy journalists with boundary issues, unsure if they want to be his best friend (“Do you like your new shoes?”) or if they want to jab a nail into his palm to see what sound he will make, so they can report on it (“Do you think you will ever be an All-Star again, or even play again?”).

Bryant was unusually subdued; there were no proclamations about his comeback, no declarations about the power of his will to overcome obstacles. Perhaps this was a calculated plan to lower expectations far enough that he could exceed them upon returning. The guy is a creature of Los Angeles, after all. He is addicted to buzzer beaters. He has an instinct for the third act. But his relative calm may have reflected the mood of a man who has spent his entire adult life being confused with God now confronting his mortality.

This is the mythic riddle posed to every physical genius at the end of his run: Can you exist without the thing that has created you? Can you be a dancer without the dance?

And what if the answer is no?

When the interview was over, Henry Abbott, of ESPN.com, drew attention to four specific words in Bryant’s response to the question about injuries: “I think we will have to look, as a league, and maybe reëvaluate things we can do,” Bryant had said, “whether it’s rest period in between [games] or different forms of recovery.”

“Different forms of recovery,” is a phrase with many possible meanings. An image of Lance Armstrong in a yellow jersey floated through the room.

The regulation of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs is one of the most delicate subjects facing the new commissioner. The N.B.A. has urine-based drug testing, but blood tests for human growth hormone have yet to be implemented; the players’ union has been resistant. The matter remains unresolved.

Having speculated on what goes on inside the players’ bodies, the next order of business was what is used to cover them. The East and West All-Star teams had special uniforms for the games. The colors were a nod the host city’s penchant for vibrancy: the West’s uniforms featured a purple fleur-de-lis on red; the East featured a green one on black. But what was most striking were the sleeved jerseys—not like the usual tank tops, but like T-shirts.

N.B.A. players are the most physically revealed athletes among the big-time sports, and, for more than a decade, the players have been working back toward the mean. Baggy shorts, to start with (Jordan), progressing to sleeves (Iverson), underarmor (Wade), tattoos (everyone). I’m tempted to say that it’s all the equivalent of a shrink or a professor wearing a beard, but there is quite a bit of facial hair in the N.B.A., too; the most famous rabbinical beard in America probably belongs to the All-Star from the Houston Rockets, James Harden.

Still, the sleeved shirts are jarring. The motivation for this change, as I understand it, apparently has to do with the average American male’s reluctance to wear a tank top. The T-shirt jersey has shown signs of being a big seller. There is also the issue of advertising on the jerseys, which the league has long discussed. There is only so much real estate to be sold on a tank top without obscuring the team logo; sleeves are the equivalent of the landfill on which Battery Park City was built. This issue, minor but not at all minor, is one of the many confronting the new commissioner.

The game, when it got underway, appeared to demonstrate how its host city’s nickname, the Big Easy, might translate on a basketball court: so much talent, and so much room in which to put it on display. The score at halftime was 89-76, with the West in the lead, which could pass for the final tally in a matchup of defensively minded teams.

The night was a parade of astonishing dunks. Blake Griffin, for example, had scored twenty points by the half, most of them dunks, on ten-for-thirteen shooting. Part of the pleasure of watching Griffin is the way he looks at the rim at more or less eye level for a second or two with that impassive glare of his—repurposed for comic effect in his television ads but, at its root, deeply menacing, a boxer’s glare—and then, as though from out of nowhere, he brings down his arm from behind his body, the ball in hand, in a massive hammer blow. Take that! The movement mimics one of those rubber mallets that gets handed out at carnivals, when you have stepped up to try the strength test. You raise it above your head, arch your back, and bring it down using all your might, with the faint hope of ringing the bell. Griffin makes the bell ring loud and clear. You could summon a town meeting with the sound of a Griffin dunk.

LeBron James also had a number of impressive dunks. His style of dunking relies more on a combination of power and quickness. He converts alley-oops like Griffin, but more often he gets to the rim on drives. His finishes are powerful, but part of the thrill in watching him dunk is the catlike way in which it happens. Unlike Griffin, who stares at the rim as though to terrify it, James almost flirts with it, turning his shoulders away in a coy, I-won’t-look-at-you sort of way; he often finishes with reverses, or semi-reverses, his eyes already elsewhere as the ball is going through the net. By that time, he is often beyond the rim, and so in effect is dunking behind his head. Griffin is a sledgehammer; James is a switchblade. James has joked about trying out for a professional football team—at least I assume they are jokes, a feint in the direction of Michael Jordan’s famous baseball sabbatical—but the mood of his dunks is less N.F.L. than Cirque du Soleil.