The NBA’s quest to “create an All-Star experience that we can be proud of and our players can be proud of” continues in earnest and with a new partner.
NBC joins the effort to inject life into what has become a moribund endeavor. Under the NBA’s new broadcast deal, the network will air the Feb. 15 game that will be hosted by the Clippers at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles.
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Commissioner Adam Silver and others in the know floated a trial balloon Wednesday evening, revealing that the 2026 All-Star Game is likely to be a round-robin tournament consisting of three eight-player teams — two composed of U.S.-born players and one of players from other countries.
The NBA and the players’ union presented the format to the league’s competition committee on Wednesday and the response was positive, according to several media outlets.
Silver acknowledged that the convoluted format used this year “was a miss.” Three eight-man all-star squads and a fourth team of rookies and sophomores played a tournament of untimed games to a target score of 40 points.
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Pitting U.S. All-Stars against those from other countries has long been an appealing concept to Silver. However, the league is about 70% American and 30% international, complicating a traditional one-game All-Star format. Creating two teams of eight U.S. all-stars and one team of eight from other countries would solve the numbers issue. The three teams would play one another in 12-minute-quarter round-robin games.
The impetus to devise a new All-Star Game format escalated when the final score in 2024 was a ridiculous 211-186. There was no defense for a game in which nobody played any defense.
Asked about the lack of effort in preventing the other team from scoring, then-Lakers center Anthony Davis shrugged and said, “It’s an All-Star Game.”
The simple East-West format of that game was an effort to get away from the musical performances, prolonged introductions and rosters drafted by team captains that had plagued the event for years.
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Silver was searching for a way to generate effort from the players and excitement from the crowd, saying before the game, “we’re not necessarily looking for players to go out there as if it’s the Finals, but we need players to play defense, we need them to care about this game. And the feeling was that maybe — and I’ll take responsibility for it; as you know, I used to run something called NBA Entertainment — that we’d gotten carried away a little bit with the entertainment aspect.”
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A combined 397 points didn’t cut it, especially the part about playing defense. The format tried in March was a flop, with Silver admitting, “We’re a bit back to the drawing board.”
Should the competition committee green-light the new format, fans in L.A. will be able to decide in February whether the NBA has finally created an All-Star event that appeals to players enough for them to make an effort.
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Television ratings might increase simply because the All-Star Game will be aired on NBC during the Milan Winter Olympics. The game will be played in the afternoon rather than the evening and is expected to be followed by NBC’s daily Olympics prime-time show from Milan.
“[The Olympics] present an enormous opportunity for us to do something with an international competition instead of the traditional All-Star formats that we’ve used,” Silver said last spring.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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