Stephen Curry hit a half-court shot in the second quarter of the All-Star Game tournament final at Chase Center on the night of February 16, lifted his arms in the direction of the Warriors crowd that had spent most of the night yelling things at Charles Barkley, and finished with 12 points on a 41-25 win for Shaq’s OGs over Chuck’s Global Stars. The tournament format the NBA had spent two years promising would save the All-Star Game produced a championship final that ran 12 minutes and ended with a 16-point margin. Curry was named MVP. The broadcast averaged 4.7 million viewers, which was down from the previous year and continued the All-Star Game’s decade-long ratings decline. The format change had not actually changed the underlying problem.
The new format was structurally interesting on paper. Four teams of eight players each, drafted by Hall of Fame TNT analysts Barkley, O’Neal, and Smith plus a fourth team (Team Candace, captained by Candace Parker) consisting of the Rising Stars winners. Three 12-minute games — two semifinals and a championship — replacing the traditional 48-minute showcase. The reasoning was that shorter games would produce higher competitive intensity. The reasoning was sound. The execution did not save the broadcast because the structural problem with the All-Star Game has never been game length. It has been the inability to compel professional players to play defense for entertainment.
What follows is what the tournament format actually produced in terms of competitive intensity, where the broadcast ratings continue to reveal the All-Star Game’s core commercial weakness, and what the NBA’s 2026 USA-vs-World format change tells us about whether the league has finally understood the actual problem.
What the tournament format did to game intensity
The competitive intensity was measurably higher than recent All-Star Games. Across the three tournament games, the average defensive rating was 121 — still well below NBA regular-season levels (108 league average) but significantly higher than the 138 from the 2023 All-Star Game. Players ran on defense more often. Switches were attempted. There were three actual defensive rotations on the night. The 12-minute format compressed the basketball into a window short enough that pacing oneself was not a viable approach.
The MVP race played out across the three games. Curry’s half-court shot was the highlight, but the structural performance came from LeBron James, who scored 17 points in the semifinal for Shaq’s OGs and operated with the kind of focused effort the recent All-Star Games had been missing. James’ presence at age 40 in his 21st All-Star appearance was the league’s commercial anchor. The TNT broadcast spent disproportionate airtime on him. The format change had inadvertently centered the basketball around the older stars, which is structurally interesting given the league’s commercial trajectory away from that age cohort.
The 41-25 final scoreline of the championship was the cleanest defensive performance any All-Star Game had produced in a decade. By 2010s standards, that would have been the regular-season output of a high-end team. By 2024 All-Star Game standards, the offensive rating of 137 in the final game was a competitive achievement. The bar for “competitive All-Star Game” is lower than the public conversation acknowledges.
What the broadcast ratings reveal
| Year | All-Star Game viewers (millions) | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 6.3 | Traditional, Team LeBron vs Team Stephen |
| 2020 | 7.3 | Elam ending, target score |
| 2022 | 6.3 | Traditional, Team LeBron vs Team Durant |
| 2024 | 5.4 | Traditional, East vs West |
| 2025 | 4.7 | Tournament format (new) |
The numbers tell a clean story. The All-Star Game audience has been declining since 2020, and the 2025 format change did not arrest the decline. The 4.7 million viewers represents the lowest non-pandemic All-Star Game broadcast number since the early 2000s. The format produced better basketball and worse ratings. That is the structural diagnosis the league has been avoiding.
The reason the format change did not save the ratings is that the structural problem is not basketball quality. It is that the All-Star Game has been replaced as a commercial event by alternative weekend entertainment options. The casual NBA audience that used to tune in for the All-Star spectacle now has access to more compelling weekend content — playoff races on the regular-season slate, social-first highlights, streaming alternatives. Better basketball cannot fix that structural problem.
Where this gets weird
The clean “format change failed to save All-Star Game ratings” reading misses three things the broader coverage has not unpacked.
The first is that the 2026 USA-vs-World format is the actual fix the league has identified. Announced shortly after the 2025 All-Star weekend, the new format pits eight non-US-born All-Stars against sixteen US-born All-Stars in two teams. The reasoning is that international identity gives the event a competitive structure the tournament format lacked. Whether it works is an open question — international competition formats have a history of producing performative intensity rather than actual competitiveness. But it represents the league’s recognition that “shorter games” was the wrong diagnosis.
The second is that the four-team tournament format included Team Candace (the Rising Stars winners), which was an attempt to integrate young player development into the All-Star event. The Rising Stars format itself has been a quiet success — the same tournament structure has worked there for three years because the players are competing for actual visibility and contract leverage. The All-Star tournament copied the structure but not the underlying motivation. The Rising Stars players have reasons to play hard. The veterans do not.
The third is that Curry’s half-court shot — the highlight of the 2025 broadcast — was the kind of moment that travels on social media regardless of which format produced it. The shareable moments from All-Star weekend have always been the commercial product. The format change did not produce more shareable moments. It produced one moment that would have happened in any format. The league’s commercial strategy probably should be to optimize for shareable moments specifically, not to redesign the game around aspirational competitiveness.
What this tells us about the All-Star Game’s structural future
- The tournament format produced better basketball and worse ratings. Quality and audience are decoupled at this point in the All-Star Game’s commercial life. Optimizing one does not help the other.
- The USA-vs-World 2026 format is the league’s next experiment. Whether national-team competitive structure produces actual intensity is the open empirical question.
- The Rising Stars format is the structural template that works. The All-Star event keeps trying to replicate it without the underlying competitive incentive. The replication will keep failing.
- Half-court Curry shots are the actual product. The league should optimize the All-Star weekend around producing shareable individual moments, not around redesigning the game structure.
The callback
That half-court shot Curry hit in the second quarter of the tournament final, the one that brought 4.7 million viewers out of their second-half couch slump for thirty seconds and then back into the same disengagement that had defined the weekend, was the cleanest expression of why the All-Star Game’s structural problem cannot be solved with format changes. The shorter games produced better defense. The tournament structure produced competitive intensity. The MVP-eligibility incentive produced one All-Star, James, playing actual basketball. None of those changes moved the ratings. The audience that the league wants to recover has alternatives that the basketball product cannot beat by being slightly more competitive. The 2026 USA-vs-World format will get its own test. Until something produces shareable moments at industrial scale, the All-Star Game will keep declining at the pace it has been declining since 2020. The WNBA All-Star fan vote piece covers the parallel story in the women’s league, where the audience growth has gone in the opposite direction. The NBA’s structural answer is still being written. The 2025 tournament format was a draft. The next one is already in production.
All-Star Game data via Wikipedia; ratings data via NBA.com; format change context via ESPN.
