The NBA always plays with the format a bit, but now that we have the teams for the 2025 Kia Skills Challenge, it’s time to start handicapping. Four teams of two players each will vie for glory at All-Star Weekend. We’ll get you the Skills Challenge picks to make sure your weekend starts off on the right foot.
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2025 Kia Skills Challenge – Picks and Predictions
Start Time: Saturday (2/15) 8:00am EST (TNT)
Event Odds:
Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley: Team Cavs (+190)
Chris Paul and Victor Wembanyama: Team Spurs (+200)
Draymond Green and Moses Moody: Team Warriors (+290)
Zaccharie Risacher and Alexandre Sarr: Team Rooks (+400)
Skills Breakdown
While they don’t have the official format of the skills competition at this time, they typically look to test three different skills – shooting, passing and speed. If we break down each of the categories separately, it becomes really clear which squad to back.
Shooting
If we start with shooting, one team is slightly above the rest. Of the eight players in the contest, the two with the highest three-point shooting percentage are on team Cavs. Both are shooting close to 40% on the year. No other team has two guys each shooting over 35% from deep. Team Spurs is the closest, and we have to imagine that Victor Wembanyama is a better deep shooter than Mobley even if the stats don’t bare out. His higher rate of shooting them and more likely to be challenged on the outside is likely to blame for the descrepancy. So for this category, we’ll go with a close pick between Team Cavs and Team Spurs with a slight edge to Team Cavs.
Passing
When we look at the passing category it’s a hard one to suss out. On one hand, Team Spurs clearly has the best passer in the contest in Chris Paul. If you take his assist to turnover ratio, he ranks number one in the contest and is more than double anyone else in there. However, nobody has a worse ratio in the contest than Wembanyama. Still if we average their numbers together, they look better than any other squad out there. Both Team Warriors and Team Cavs are a distant second in the category, with Team Rooks in a real ugly last place.
Speed
It’s hard to quantify how much speed will play into the category and how much we know about player speed in the NBA. The only players that we have recent speed data for are the guys on Team Rooks. If you look at their sprint numbers from the Rookie Combine, it isn’t pretty. Alexandre Sarr ranked 57th of 78 players that did the sprint event. Zaccharie Risacher was somehow worse – finishing 71st. When we look to the other teams, we want a guy who is both fast and you don’t have to worry about effort. Neither of those feel like they bode well for Draymond Green. The easy strides of Wembanyama and the quickness of Chris Paul, even at his age, seem like the ones who would lead the pack.
Best Bet: Team Spurs (+200)
With a clear lead in the passing and a close look at winning the shooting, you have to like their chances of winning this one. I do think Team Cavs are a close second, but the shooting percentage from deep of Mobley is just something I’m not willing to push myself over the edge on. Take Paul and Wemby for the win this weekend.
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If you’d like even more info on the 2025 Kia Skills Challenge and all of All-Star Weekend, including some All-Star picks, check out the NBA Gambling Podcast. They’re dropping episodes five days a week to make you the smartest guy/gal at the bar.
