NEW YORK — The NBA All-Star Game’s mini-tournament format will not return next season.
Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday that the first-year format the league used last month for the NBA All-Star Game at San Francisco’s Chase Center “was a miss.”
The four-team tourney included 24 NBA All-Stars across three teams as well as another squad of rookies and sophomores who played their way in by winning the Rising Stars event on All-Star Friday. The tournament featured untimed games to a target score of 40 points.
“We’re not there in terms of creating an All-Star experience that we can be proud of and our players can be proud of,” Silver said.
The game is shifting to NBC next season as part of the league’s new television broadcast deal, and Silver said the league and the network are talking about what may work. The league tried something new this season with hopes of sparking some competitiveness, which the game has lacked for years.
“We’re a bit back to the drawing board,” Silver said.
Some players liked the All-Star format this season, others did not, and a few didn’t seem to have much of an opinion either way. The tournament was put into place after the 2024 All-Star Game produced more points than ever — a 211-186 final score that set a slew of records and essentially was the last straw for the league when it came to putting up with a no-defense contest for its midseason exhibition.
“I think it was a good step in the right direction to reinvigorate the game in some way,” All-Star Game MVP Stephen Curry of the host Golden State Warriors said after last month’s event.
There was one particular element that flopped from a competitive standpoint this year, that being a long stoppage in play — almost 20 minutes — during the tournament’s championship game to pay tribute to the TNT broadcast team that was involved in the airing of the game for the final time.
“It was well intentioned,” Silver said. “But I think the long stoppage in play in that final game didn’t work for anyone.”
Next year’s game will be during the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, which will be aired on the NBC family of networks, so it may seem logical to play off that in some way and utilize some sort of U.S. versus International format, which has been talked about in recent years.
The NBA All-Star Game will also be aired on NBC, so it will slightly shift from a Sunday evening to a Sunday afternoon tipoff time because of the broadcast being on Feb. 15, 2026, from Inglewood, California, at the Intuit Dome, the home of the Los Angeles Clippers that opened this season.
That move allows the game to be followed on NBC by the network’s daily Olympics prime-time show from Milan, with the network continuing to show top events live during the day on NBC, as well as the entire Olympics streaming live on Peacock.