Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
The NBA’s most recent attempt to fix its All-Star Game was an unmitigated disaster with the potential to be the final nail in a coffin that was already firmly shut. However, there may be a potential fix courtesy of another event that kicked off shortly before the festivities got underway thanks to the NHL.
The first NBA All-Star Game was held all the way back in 1951, and while it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment it stopped being an even somewhat competitive affair, it’s lost its luster at an exponential rate over the course of the past decade or so as it’s become increasingly clear the best players in the league could not care less about the outcome.
The NBA has repeatedly attempted to tinker with the format to add some extra levels of intrigue after abandoning the classic East vs. West showdown for the first time in 2018.
The decision to let two captains draft their own team instead of using conferences to dictate rosters was a novel idea that was nonetheless abandoned in 2024, which was also the case with the Elam ending (a.k.a. target score format) that was introduced in 2020 before being used for the last time in 2023.
This year, the powers that be rolled out yet another new approach with the introduction of a four-team tournament that made its grand debut on Sunday night.
However, there’s a very good chance the first installment also ends up being the last based on the universally panned three-hour affair that only featured 42 minutes of actual basketball (and 80 minutes of advertisements), grating commentary from Kevin Hart, and the absence of LeBron James and Anthony Edwards, who both pulled out at the last minute.
The reception to the 2025 NBA All-Star Game stands in stark contrast to the one the NHL received after abandoning the contest entirely in favor of the 4 Nations Tournament that featured teams comprised of players from the United States, Canada, Finland, and Sweden taking part in the series of games that kicked off in Montreal last week before heading to Boston for the conclusion.
Saturday night’s highly-anticipated tilt between the Americans and their neighbors to the north not only lived up to the hype but garnered an impressive 4.4 million viewers who got to see three fights break out in the first nine seconds before the U.S. earned a 3-1 victory in front of a hostile crowd.
Part of the reason the 4 Nations was able to generate that amount of hype is the fact that NHL players haven’t been able to play in the Winter Olympics since 2014, and the international nature of that affair is a big reason it was greeted with immediate success.
While NBA fans have been able to get that particular fix a bit more often courtesy of the Summer Olympics and the FIBA World Cup, the league has never harnessed an international approach for the All-Star Game—and it’s become increasingly clear it’s probably time to give that a shot.
There are a few options when it comes to the potential format, but a three-team approach involving players from the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world would probably offer the most parity. There’s no guarantee it would be the fix the NBA desperately needs, but it’s certainly not going to hurt based on the product we’ve been treated to in recent years.