This weekend is going to be awesome.It’s not all the Valentine’s Day extracurricular activities arousing my interests. It’s the greatest all-star weekend in professional sports.The NBA will be holding its 57th All-Star Game live from Phoenix on Sunday night and will have skills competitions the weekend leading up to it. Ballin’.It is without a doubt the best showcase of any sport’s top stars.Major League Baseball — which I now realize was probably overwhelmingly dirty  — is the only organization that even comes close. The home run derby alone puts baseball up there with basketball.Who could forget the Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton blasting 28 home runs in the first round of the competition last summer? It was something magical.But other than that, baseball has nothing.The games themselves are boring and often last far too long.Last year I had to sit through nearly an hour’s worth of introductions before the game started, and the actual game lasted five hours. I live on the East Coast, and I can’t stay up until 2 a.m. to watch a game that doesn’t matter. The NFL’s all-star festivities are a flat-out joke. They don’t have any sort of skills competitions — and haven’t since 2007.The game is played a week after the regular season, and most of the players look as if they don’t give two bits about playing it.They’re probably just out there for the cool Hawaiian vacation.And the NHL All-Star Game matters even less — probably because I’ve never had the opportunity to play hockey or learn anything about it. The NBA is just on another level. The Rookie Challenge and Celebrity All-Star Game on Friday night starts off the festivities. Terrell Owens, Master P., Chris Tucker and Reggie Bush all shared the court last year for the celebrity event. That’s pretty cool.Nowhere else do you get to see people from all walks of life play a pick-up game on such a large scale. Saturday is where the real fun starts.You get the Shooting Stars Competition, the Skills Challenge, the Three-Point Shootout the Slam Dunk Contest and a new event that I’m pretty excited for. I am J-A-C-K-E-D for H-O-R-S-E.Joe Johnson — who should be an all-star starter — O.J. Mayo and Kevin Durant — the biggest all-star snub this season — will take the floor for the most intriguing event of the weekend. The guys in the H-O-R-S-E competition are all supremely talented, and I can’t wait to see what kind of tomfoolery they get themselves into. The dunk contest, like always, will please. Since they put in a time limit, we don’t have to see ex-junkies like Chris “Birdman” Andersen and the vertically challenged Nate Robinson miss dozens of attempts. Instead we get to see Gerald Green blow out candles on the rim and Dwight Howard put on a Superman cape and take flight from the free-throw line.The other contests are enough to keep my attention as well.But nothing can match the awesomeness of the actual game. Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Amare Stoudemire, Yao Ming and Chris Paul are all on the starting roster for the West. Though Paul may not play, this is still a basketball fan’s dream. The game will be so much fun to watch — way more fun than any of those other sports.I can’t wait until the weekend.—-Contact Casey Gisclair at [email protected]