Not just America's game anymore — Is it time to pit the USA vs. the world in NBA All-Star Game?

Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has said that next week's All-Star weekend will be as big of a party as today's Super Bowl.

As farfetched as that may seem — since the midseason exhibition basketball game has nowhere near the import as the NFL's winner-take-all title game — the All-Star weekend is truly as big as it gets for the NBA.

Each game in the best-of-7 NBA Finals, of course, has more meaning from a competitive standpoint than the All-Star Game. But the Finals lack the pre-determined location that allows celebrities, fans and corporate types to turn Super Bowls and the NBA All-Star Games into long party weekends.

And while tens of millions fewer fans will tune into the All-Star Game on TNT than will watch today's Super Bowl on television, there will actually be more folks watching live next week.

In fact, the All-Star Game will draw at least 90,000 and perhaps more than 100,000 — because it is being played in the new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. League commissioner David Stern said Friday it will be the largest crowd "in the history of the world."

And he'll be right, at least for basketball. The current record crowd for basketball is 78,129 set during a college game played at Detroit's Ford Field in 2003.

But while the All-Star Weekend is a chance for the NBA to showcase itself, the game is usually dreadfully dull. Sure, there are plenty of offensive highlights, dunks and such. But little defense is played and the game often becomes a joke, with players on both teams not particularly interested in winning or losing.

Every so often there are different suggestions as to how to make all-star games more meaningful in basketball and other sports. Major League Baseball, for instance, decided to determine the World Series' home-field advantage on which league won their midseason classic following a debacle of a 2002 game that ended in a tie.

But giving the home-court advantage to the winning conference in the NBA is not a valid idea. Each NBA team plays every other team in the league at least twice, and the home-court advantage in the Finals simply goes to the team with the better regular-season record — as it should.

But an idea that could add some motivation and pride in the game for All-Stars has been bandied about for a few years. Rather than dividing the stars into conferences — East and West — the teams could be more like the Olympics or the Ryder Cup. That way, national and international pride would be on the line.