Hollywood award season is in full swing, and over the next month or so, some of the best athletes in the world will also be honored at the All-Star games that are scheduled to take place over that stretch of time.

Three of the four major leagues in North America hold their All-Star festivities over a roughly three-week span in the winter, with the NHL All-Star Game on January 25, the Pro Bowl on January 26, and the NBA All-Star game on February 16.

An All-Star game should be an easy recipe for creating an exciting event that fans circle on their calendars. You’ve got the best players in the world all on one field, court, or rink showing off their skills. Yet, somehow, this usually results in an absolute snoozefest.

However, not every All-Star game is created equal, so let’s take a closer look at these events and rank the ones put on by the four major leagues: the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB.

4. The Pro Bowl

The Pro Bowl is a distant fourth place. In fact, it’s a good thing we’re not including the MLS All-Star Game, the NASCAR All-Star Race, or even those halftime Mascots vs. Pop Warner kids games. Otherwise, there’s a chance the Pro Bowl would slide even further down the list.

There is a lot that’s broken about the Pro Bowl. The biggest problem is that it’s used as an opening act for the Super Bowl but it’s about as successful at drumming up excitement as the Hindenberg was at landing in New Jersey.

Imagine going to see your favorite band live. They’re known for putting on a great show time and time again. That’s the Super Bowl.

Now, imagine that you first have to sit through the opening act but that opening act consists of a guy playing “Camptown Races” on a kazoo stuck between his ass cheeks. You’d be confused and would even wonder why an opening act is necessary in the first place.

The Pro Bowl is Ass Kazoo Guy.

By virtue of the game being held the week before the Super Bowl, no player from either Super Bowl-bound team attends the Pro Bowl. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that quite a few of the league’s best players are members of its two best teams?

If the same thing happened in the NBA, we’d be in the midst of a five-year drought without a member of the Golden State Warriors playing in an All-Star game. That would just be weird.

The other problem the Pro Bowl has is that it’s the only event of the four that doesn’t regularly move from venue to venue. The game has been held in Orlando since 2016, but prior to that, Aloha Stadium hosted most years stretching back to 1980.

If the game traveled from city to city with a different host each year, it would feel like more of a special event that would see fanbases—and entire cities for that matter—excited about the prospect of playing host and showing off for a weekend.

The NFL introduced a skills competition to the Pro Bowl a few years back and it didn’t really add much. The events are kind of weird. You’ve got guys catching footballs dropped from drones and pelting each other in a game of dodgeball. It’s sort of like gym class.

Sure, most leagues lack an All-Star game that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats but football is the sport least suited for a leisurely, injury-free experience. When you take the aggression out of the game, you’re left with nothing but guys casually wandering around a field for a couple of hours. It’s really a surprise that they haven’t said “Screw it” and have them play flag football instead.

3. The NBA All-Star Game

After the train wreck that is the Pro Bowl, the NBA’s All-Star game is a major step up but that doesn’t mean it’s not without its fair share of problems.

The NBA is a league that is built around star power so showing off all of that talent on a single court is a huge opportunity that the league can’t afford to squander.

The Skills Competition is pretty entertaining. The three-point contest is always good for some drama as shooters compete against each other and the clock.

However, without question, the highlight of the entire weekend is the Slam Dunk Contest. A guy throwing down is one of the most impressive athletic feats out there and the creative component to it adds another layer of intrigue.

With that said, the dunk contest needs to make sure it doesn’t fall victim to its biggest scourge: props.

I’m not a fan of the introduction of props at all. The contest isn’t supposed to be centered around who can jump over the craziest thing or who wears the best costume. I just want dunks. Plain and simple. Whether or not a player is wearing a cape or a wacky hat while they jump over a Ferrari shouldn’t matter.

While the skills competition is pretty great, the NBA All-Star Weekend falls victim to the same pitfalls as many of its cross-sport counterparts: the All-Star Game itself.

A lot of the problems stem from the fact that the All-Star game doesn’t have much of a resemblance to a normal game aside from the ball being used. Just take a look at the scores from the last three editions of the NBA All-Star Game:

• 2017: West, 192 – East 182
• 2018: Team LeBron, 148 – Team Stephen, 145
• 2019: Team LeBron, 178 – Team Giannis, 164

Those scores are monstrous. Sure, defense doesn’t necessarily put asses in seats and eyes on screens, but would it be so wrong to see someone block a shot or break up a pass?

You do have to hand it to the NBA for trying to switch up the format a little bit and letting captains select their own teams. It’s a formula that’s been used by other leagues in the past but it does add another reason for fans to tune in.

2. The MLB All-Star Game

Baseball’s actual gameplay lends itself to an All-Star game better than any other sport.

The Midsummer Classic is probably the most highly regarded of the four games on this list. It has earned that distinction too, considering it’s a solid event that’s been around forever.

MLB eschews a more traditional skills competition in favor of the Home Run Derby and what a great decision that is. They could easily have some events to see who can run the bases the fastest or who can throw the farthest. That sort of seems like it would be interesting for a few years but it’d eventually get stale.

But do you know what doesn’t get stale? The long ball.

Chicks dig the long ball and so does virtually everyone else.

An evening of nothing but dingers is a brilliant idea. Baseball often gets slammed for being slow and boring, but for one night a year, it’s nothing but the excitement of seeing cowhide soar through the air for 500 feet.

The actual All-Star game is about as solid as any sport could make it without switching up the formula in some way. It just seems less obvious when guys are phoning it in. Sure, you’ll see the occasional player dogging it instead of trying to leg out an infield single but it still beats two offensive linemen having a chat about the best places to grab a bite in Orlando instead of blocking.

With that said, there was one fella who would never be caught dead phoning it in even in an All-Star game: baseball legend (and Cooperstown persona non grata) Pete Rose. Here he is barreling over then-Indians catcher Ray Fosse.

That was in the 1970 All-Star game, which took place about 30 years before the game would determine home-field advantage in the World Series. So what was it Rose was playing so hard for? Pride…or perhaps the National League moneyline?

The All-Star game is no longer the World Series home-field advantage decider. Personally, I like the idea of having something on the line for the two teams to play for. The problem with that prize was that it couldn’t have been a huge incentive for players representing teams who were dwelling in the basement of their divisions since mid-May and didn’t even have a hope of sniffing the postseason.

I don’t think that the MLB All-Star game is really broken in any way at all. In fact, drastic changes would probably hurt an event that is so steeped in tradition.

1. The NHL All-Star Game

If I was making this list several years ago, the NHL All-Star game would not have been at the top, but the league’s steps to make the game a better experience for both players and fans is commendable.

The NHL has always played with the format of the All-Star game (even if it’s only slightly). Around the turn of the millennium, the more traditional conference-based teams were dropped in favor of a North America vs. The World format that shook things up a little bit but that was still only a small wrinkle

The league introduced a fantasy draft concept in 2011, which was cool for several years, but eventually, the novelty wore off and they needed something fresh and new to revitalize the game. A change was especially necessary after a gong show in 2015 that ended with the teams combining for 29 goals.

Then came the godsend that was the introduction of 3-on-3 overtime.

First brought into the game to cut back on regular-season contests decided in shootouts, the reduced number of players on the ice upped the excitement and allowed for greater creativity on the part of skaters and goaltenders alike. It quickly became popular with fans and the league astutely made the decision to do a four-team 3-on-3 tournament at the 2016 All-Star game in Nashville.

While hockey is a physical game, you don’t find yourself really missing the grit that was also absent in previous iterations of the All-Star Game because that aspect of the game is already missing in regular-season 3-on-3 overtime thanks to the additional space that’s available out on the ice.

The NHL could’ve easily stayed the course and not tried to make the All-Star Game more entertaining for fans, but instead of resting on its laurels, the league set out to find a way to make the game more appealing to fans and accomplished exactly that.

The best players in the game are given a perfect place to showcase what they can do and a $1 million prize is plenty of incentive to leave everything on the ice.

The NHL Skills Competition is another great part of the annual event, but in all honesty, it’s getting more gimmicky every year. This season, you’ve got players shooting pucks from the concourse. Maybe it’ll be cool, but if they continue to up the level of gimmickry, it could be detrimental to the event overall.

Still, it would take a lot for the Skills Competition to put a damper on the excitement of the 3-on-3 tournament. The simple fact that the game itself is the highlight of the NHL’s All-Star weekend is why the league sits at the top of this list.