Indianapolis will be in the spotlight this weekend as it hosts the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend, which got underway on Friday. One of the events that takes place during All-Star Saturday Night at Lucas Oil Stadium is the 2024 Skills Challenge, which begins the evening's festivities at 8 p.m. ET. A trio of three-man teams will participate, with one consisting of players from the host Indiana Pacers. The Skills Challenge begins with a five-event team relay and also includes a team passing event and a team shooting exercise. If a tiebreaker is needed, there will be a half-court shooting contest to determine a champion.
Team Top Picks, which features Orlando's Paolo Banchero, Minnesota's Anthony Edwards and San Antonio's Victor Wembanyama, opened as the favorite, but now is +200 (risk $100 to win $200) in the latest 2024 NBA Skills Challenge odds. Team All-Stars, with Toronto's Scottie Barnes, Philadelphia's Tyrese Maxey and Atlanta's Trae Young, is priced at +150. Team Pacers, featuring Tyrese Haliburton, Bennedict Mathurin and Myles Turner, is the new slight favorite at +140. Before making any 2024 NBA Skills Challenge picks, you need to see what Sportsline's NBA expert Mike Barner has to say.
A respected NBA Fantasy expert, both season-long and daily, Barner's work has appeared in Sports Illustrated and on Yahoo, RotoWire and KFFL. He's also been featured on ESPN Radio. Barner digs deep into the data, examining team trends and projecting game outcomes.
Barner's expertise has been on full display over a wide sample. Over the past four seasons at SportsLine, Mike went 462-397 against the spread, returning $2,509 to $100 bettors. He enters the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend on a 15-5 roll on NBA picks, returning more than $800. He also has an incredible feel for NBA All-Star Weekend. In 2022, Barner correctly picked Team Cavs to win the Skills Challenge. Anyone following his picks has seen some huge returns.
Now, Barner has analyzed the NBA Skills Challenge 2024 from all angles and just locked in his coveted picks and All-Star Weekend predictions. You can only see his NBA Skills Challenge picks at SportsLine.
2024 NBA Skills Challenge predictions
One surprise: Barner is fading Team Top Picks. While each of the first two rounds of the Skills Challenge offers 100 "Challenge Points" to the winner, the team shooting event awards 200 to the victor, and Barner thinks that may be a problem for the trio of Banchero, Edwards and Wembanyama. Team Pacers boasts the top two shooters in the event as Turner is first among the nine participating players with a field-goal percentage of 52.4% this season, while Haliburton ranks second at 49.3% and has the best 3-point percentage at 39.6 %.
Team All-Stars has the third-best shooters in each category, with Barnes occupying the spot in field-goal percentage (47.1%) and Maxey doing the same in 3-point percentage (38.0%). Team Top Picks has two of the three weakest shooters from beyond the arc in the competition as Banchero is seventh at 35.4% and Wembanyama is last at 31.9%. In addition, the squad does not have a player in the top three in field-goal percentage, with Edwards and Wembanyama tied for fourth (46.8%) and Banchero ranking sixth (45.6%). See which team to back here.
How to make 2024 NBA Skills Challenge picks
Barner has studied the NBA Skills Challenge from every angle and found a critical X-factor that makes one of these teams a must-back on Saturday night. See who it is over at SportsLine.
Who wins the NBA Skills Challenge 2024, and which critical X-factor do you need to know about? Visit SportsLine now to get Mike Barner's pick for the NBA Skills Challenge, all from the expert who has crushed his NBA picks, and find out.
2024 NBA Skills Challenge odds, teams
See picks at SportsLine
Team Pacers +140
Team All-Stars +150
Team Top Picks +200
