After another poorly received All-Star Game, thee NBA’s new mini-tournament format might not be here to last. That is perhaps a bit of a shame because league’s latest attempt to create a more entertaining and competitive All-Star Game was reasonably successful in terms of the basketball we saw on the court.
The first two games were competitive and saw all four teams showing honest to god effort on both ends of the floor at times and looked like actual basketball games. The final game saw Shaq’s OGs jump out to a quick 11-0 lead on Chuck’s Global Stars and then devolved into the type of low-stakes basketball we’ve come to expect from the All-Star Game. The good news is, in a game to 40, even a bad game goes quickly. You get a guy to catch fire like Stephen Curry (trying harder than most in his home All-Star Game), hitting a halfcourt shot and some silly threes, and it’s enough to make things reasonably entertaining and ends quickly without falling into total chaos.
The problem with the 2025 All-Star Game had little to do with the quality of basketball on the court, which is perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay to the new format. The issue was that three games to 40 in an All-Star atmosphere go extremely quickly and the TV broadcast is determined to fill a three-hour window.
That meant we were treated to some truly dreadful segments, including an inordinate amount of Kevin Hart (in case you were not aware, Kevin is very short and NBA players are quite tall) and Damian Lillard having to purposefully try to miss enough logo threes to let a fan win $100,000 from Mr. Beast. They did that plus desk analysis from the TNT crew outside of each game, which was mostly notable because Draymond Green spent the entire night absolutely torching the new format, giving it a 0 out of 10 and decrying it as “not basketball” — which was a bit funny given we saw more actual basketball played tonight than we have in any All-Star Game since 2020.
I should say, the musical act this year was excellent and was not part of the problem. The Pass The Mic Live show with Bay Area legends was easily one of the best parts of the evening and far more entertaining than anything else they did between games. It also took less time from start to finish than one of the Kevin Hart segments with the Inside the NBA crew did and I really wish I was kidding about that.
The aforementioned segment saw Hart and some All-Stars send the Inside crew “Gone Fishing”, which could’ve been a fun moment if it had been done quickly and did not somehow create a 16(!) minute stoppage in the middle of the final game — also, Inside the NBA is not ending after this season and will instead be licensed to ESPN next year. It was emblematic of the problems of this year’s All-Star presentation, which was by trying desperately to stretch things out for a TV window, the basketball became secondary to a sketch show.
The problem is, I don’t think there’s really a fix unless you’re going to accept that this should be a two-hour long event. Part of why the games worked is the short format trims a lot of the fat that makes All-Star basketball tough to watch. There weren’t long spells of teams trading wide open dunks or heaving deep threes because the games to 40 make each game basically the two parts of each All-Star Game that are entertaining — the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes. If you made them games to 60 or 70, then you’d create more of that middle area where guys lose focus and open the door for more blowouts.
There probably isn’t a better way to execute an All-Star format if the goal is “reasonably competitive basketball” — barring players being open to a 1-on-1 tournament — and even the somewhat controversial inclusion of the Rising Stars winner worked as intended. They were trying very hard and pushed the OGs to the most competitive game of the entire thing because they really wanted to win and the All-Stars didn’t want to get embarrassed by losing. However, it cannot be a three-hour event because there’s nothing to fill the time basketball-wise — unless they give up on Saturday Night and put the Three-Point and Dunk Contests between games, which they’ll never do. Otherwise, you have a night of stops and starts where the basketball part (which the league has insisted has to be better) gets shoved to the periphery.
We’ll see what the league and NBC cook up next year in the first year with a new network taking charge, but given how reactive the league has been to criticism in recent years, I’m not sure the mini-tournament format is going to make it to 2026. After the players have gotten plenty of blame in recent years (at times quite deservedly so), the league has to take this one on the chin because it wasn’t a basketball issue this year, it was the 2.5 hours of nonsense happening around 30 minutes of hoops.
