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The NBA once again attempted to inject new life into the All-Star Game in 2025 only to miss the mark in resounding fashion. It seemed safe to assume viewership was going to take a hit based on what fans were forced to endure, and that ended up being the case now that the numbers have been tabulated.
The NBA All-Star Game had already been on life support for a few years when the league made yet another decision to switch things up by adopting a four-team tournament it was hoping could be the spark it desperately needed to make fans—and, arguably more importantly, players—care about the embattled contest.
Unfortunately, anyone who tuned in was treated to a bloated, ad-filled three-hour affair that only featured around 40 minutes of actual basketball being played, and while the All-Star Game certainly got people talking, it was firmly for all of the wrong reasons.
There was little doubt that discontent was going to be reflected in the television ratings the most recent installment of the All-Star Game was able to garner, and on Wednesday, Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports confirmed that was the case when he revealed the NBA averaged 4.718 million viewers across the three networks the game aired on—down 13% from the approximately 5.8 million it posted last year.
NBA All-Star Game viewership was down 13% vs last year.
2025 – 4.718M viewers across TNT/TBS/TruTV
2024 – 5.398MNote that Nielsen recently boosted OOH ratings and the Super Bowl set a record despite not being a close game.
— Ryan Glasspiegel (@sportsrapport) February 19, 2025
It is worth noting the exhibition had some pretty stiff competition from another one it was able to narrowly beat: the NHL’s 4 Nations showdown between the USA and Canada, which averaged 4.4 million viewers when it unfolded on Saturday night (there’s zero doubt the finals rematch scheduled for Thursday evening will end up blowing the NBA All-Star Game out of the water).
As Glasspiegel notes, the 2023 NBA All-Star Game is the only one that’s managed to attract fewer viewers since the start of the century (4.6 million tuned into that one), and based on what we were treated to this year, it’s very hard to imagine a good chunk of fans who watched on Saturday would go out of their way to do so next season barring some significant changes.
With that said, the league seems to be running out of potential ways to fix a game that may just be irreparably broken, so it’s going to be very interesting to see how it plans to approach things next year.