All-Star Games in America died a long time ago

The data shows that it's long overdue: we need to put the NBA All-Star game to rest.

(Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

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Confession: I spent All-Star weekend taking my girls to Disneyworld. As many parents warned me would happen, I tapped out as soon as the sun went down. I was cooked. As far as parenting goes, I’d venture to say this is the most exhausting experience I’ve had since they were born. (We had a blast).

Needless to say, I missed a lot of the NBA All-Star Weekend festivities. The delayed start didn’t help, but my eyes did not stay open to watch the All-Star Game live on Sunday.

And it appears I didn’t miss much.

I recommend reading pieces from Ethan Strauss, Tom Ziller and Neil Paine. As I was digesting all of it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’re all rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

It’s become abundantly clear to me that the NBA All-Star game isn’t salvageable because All-Star games, as a concept, are not salvageable.

I pulled together the reported ratings from various posts from the indispensable Sports Media Watch tracking over the years. The actual rating number from Sunday isn’t out yet (more on that later) but the trend is pretty damn clear:

Yikes. It’s obvious this is not a uniquely NBA problem. The NBA has followed the same long-term trend as NFL and MLB: down. Outside of early 2010s resurgence in the NFL, the three sports have been in a tailspin since the 1990s heyday. If I had to pinpoint a time when the All-Star Game died as we knew it, it was probably the dawn of the Internet in the early 2000s. That’s when the All-Star Game viewership curve seem to have its steepest decline.

Why don’t people watch like they used to? The All-Star Game used to be the only time you could see the stars play together. It was a spectacle. But as time goes on, that magical dust has lost its power.

Certainly with the NBA, the novelty has worn off. Stars are creating their own All-Star teams. Fans can turn on NBA2K if they want to see what happens when LeBron James teams up with Stephen Curry. The East vs. West dynamic died in the player empowerment era. Kevin Durant is in which conference now?

And now, TV viewers have cell phones. They have options.

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Perhaps the most poignant moment of Sunday’s events came during the annual Adam Silver pregame press conference when Howard Beck of The Ringer posed a question to the commissioner. To paraphrase it, Beck wanted to know why, after years of tinkering with the format (i.e. Elam Ending, player draft, quarter scoring), the NBA decided to reset and go back to the old way of East vs. West.

Beck has been covering the NBA a long time, and he shrewdly disarmed the commissioner a bit by asking that he not use the ‘tradition’ in his answer. It elicited a genuine laugh out of Silver and he played along.

Silver answered by saying everyone agreed that the status quo wasn’t working. He conceded that he, as the former head of NBA entertainment, may have “gotten carried away a little bit” with the innovations/gimmicks/tinkering. So they reset.

They wanted to get “back to basketball.” The key snippets:

Then, of course, if the game is lousy, then you all [the media] just are doing your jobs and representing what’s happening here to the world, the reports are it was a lousy All-Star because the game wasn’t that exciting. And, frankly, fans are able to vote by what they watch too. They have so many options.

So the thought was here, we sat down with the players, we said, let’s return to a focus on the game of basketball. Let’s come pretty close to your typical routine. We still want the opportunity to introduce to fans around the world the All-Star rosters. We still want to have a little bit of fun at halftime, so just add a slight amount of time and let’s see what we get.

My sense is it’s a combination of discussions that the leadership of the players are having with the All-Stars. I think discussions Joe Dumars is having directly with players. Frankly, having Joe Dumars and his credibility in the league office, I think we’re going to see a good game tomorrow night.

[smiling] And I didn’t use the word “tradition.”

[ Director voice ]: It was not a good game. East “won” 211-186.

Silver essentially told the players: fine, have it your way. Let’s see what happens. Silver gave the ball to the players and trusted them to play hard. And they threw up an airball. If the players don’t care, why should the fans?

And sheesh, how about Silver’s line: “And frankly, fans are able to vote by what they watch too. They have so many options.” It was refreshing to hear. You rarely see the commissioner refer to low ratings as a barometer of whether something is working. As Ethan Strauss has covered extensively, NBA ratings has been in free fall for years. Here, Silver is suggesting that fans have tuned out the All-Star and so they had to do something to get them back.

OK, so they reset the format. They brought in Joe Dumars (?). They got Stephen Curry back (he was out last year) and Durant (out as well).

Alright, to use a line used by Silver, how did the fans vote?

The game registered the second-lowest All-Star game on record, an audience of 5.5 million. It was up 14 percent compared to last year’s dud, but after all that talk (even Larry Bird called out the players!), the NBA lost almost a million viewers from the last time Stephen Curry played in 2021.

Ouch. Now we’re back to the same question we have every year, “How do we fix the All-Star Game?” And I think Sunday’s embarrassing affair may have finally pushed the players and owners to the real answer: You don’t. You move on.

I don’t think incentivizing players with money makes a difference. No matter how real the injury risk is, NBA stars don’t want to get hurt in an exhibition. The NFL came to that realization years ago and made it flag-football game instead. Millions still watched. The NBA should do the same.

Will they? I think we’ve reached the point where the NBA might finally throw their hands up and ditch the All-Star Game altogether. Silver’s appeal to the players didn’t work. It backfired. One way to read it is that it was a last ditch effort by Silver. So, bring on a 3-on-3 tournament or H-O-R-S-E. Make the 3-point contest the main Sunday event or pay players to participate in the dunk contest. Indeed, fans are voting by what they watch. It’s time to call it.