Despite it being the “All-Star” Weekend, not all eyes were on the NBA this past weekend. According to Front-Office Sports, the 2024-25 NBA All-Star experience was the second least-watched in the contest’s history, averaging about 4.7 million viewers (Salao). The low viewership follows an ongoing trend showing the continuous fall of ratings over the past few seasons. In fact, the lowest rated All-Star game took place just two years ago, when the 2023 All-Star Game averaged 4.6 million viewers (Salao).
The NBA tried out something different this all-star weekend, with four NBA Young Stars teams battling to be the fourth team in the All-Star tournament. While the tournament introduced many casual NBA fans—like myself—to Stephon Castle, fans and stars alike see the NBA All-Star weekend as a pointless event.
While Mac McClung is singlehandedly keeping the dunk contest alive, other NBA stars don’t have the same drive to compete. Spurs sensation Victor Wembanyama chucked basketballs at the floor instead of trying to shoot for basket in the NBA Skills competition. The winners of the Skills competition get $55,000. (Sporting News).
$55,000 would be life changing money for the average, middle class worker, it’s just another day’s work for even an NBA role player. For someone like Victor Wembanyama, who makes $12,000,000, or his teammate Chris Paul who has made over $400,000,000 in career earnings (Both stats from Spotrac), the incentive just isn’t enough to warrant maximum effort. The result is a boring event. While the NBA All-Star Game has been taken as a joke for a long time, this year was undoubtedly the worst. One reddit thread even counted out the time breakdown during the broadcast, showing that despite three all-star games being played, the total time fans spent watching basketball was 42 minutes compared to the 80 minutes spent watching advertisements. (r/NBA on Reddit).
These numbers have major implications on the viewership of the game. Sure, it doesn’t help that LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo didn’t participate in the all-star game, nor does it help that notorious dunkers like Ja Morant, Zach Lavine, and Aaron Gordon didn’t participate in the dunk contest. With the loss of big game stars, fans lose another incentive to watch these sorts of events. Unfortunately, when a competition means nothing, people don’t care about it.
The NHL has handled this problem brilliantly with the four nations tournament. Playing for one’s country just means more. As a result, hockey has taken a stage that I truly can’t remember seeing it at in my lifetime. People are talking about the 4-Nations more than they talk have previously talked about the Stanley Cup. In fact, the USA-Canada game that was the precursor to the 4-Nations final averaged 10.1 million viewers (Bleacher Report).There’s an intense passion that hopefully will lead to hockey becoming a larger sport in the United States.
Winning the MLB All-Star game used to secure the right to home field advantage for the team representing the winning league in the World Series. While that doesn’t exist anymore, the MLB still has one of the more entertaining all-star events in professional sports. The MLB benefits even further from having one of the most exciting skills competitions in professional sports: the Home Run Derby, with a $1,000,000 prize to the winner (USA Today).
Then, of course, there is the NFL Pro Bowl. If NBA All-Star Weekend is a joke, the NFL Pro Bowl is the three hour comedy. With no incentives and a major risk for additional injuries, the traditional Pro-Bowl has been replaced with the “Pro-Bowl Games” where teams play flag football, dodgeball, and quarterbacks compete to see who is the most accurate passer. None of it means anything. Even the incentive of having a weeklong vacation in Hawaii is gone. All of this put together is the direction that the NBA has traveled.
So how does the NBA fix it? Could they run their own 4-Nations style tournament? If France, Serbia, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States could build teams, it would give the players far more incentive to play. Do they increase the financial incentives for players competing in the All-Star Game or skills events? Whatever the NBA decides to do, something has to change. Otherwise, the 2nd most popular sporting league in the United States is going to have the same problem the NFL does, no one cares about your biggest in-season event.
