This past weekend, Los Angeles hosted the NBA’s annual All-Star weekend at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood. Sunday’s All-Star Game marked the league’s 75th edition of the event, but in recent years, the NBA has strayed from the traditional format fans once knew. While the league has made efforts to make the game — and the weekend as a whole — more entertaining, those changes may have pushed it further away from success, convoluting an event that was once very clear.
Changes to the game’s traditional format first came on Oct. 3, 2017. Rather than having teams represent the Eastern and Western Conferences, the top All-Star vote-getters served as captains for two teams and conducted a schoolyard-style draft of the remaining All-Stars to select their teammates. While this made for entertaining content in the weeks leading up to All-Star weekend — such as Kevin Durant awkwardly avoiding picking former teammate James Harden, who had recently been traded to the Philadelphia 76ers — it ultimately did not change the game itself.
For nearly 70 years, the All-Star Game had been defined by a lack of defensive effort, with players playing virtually no defense and allowing the score to climb into the 200s. The novelty of watching a ‘superteam’ made up of the best players in the world had already begun to wear off long before the change in 2017, especially when players treated the game so casually and failed to truly compete against one another. Once again, the team captain draft provided a new layer of entertainment, but the game itself remained completely unchanged.
In 2020, the NBA built upon these changes and paid homage to the late Kobe Bryant by introducing a new set of rules for the fourth quarter. After three quarters, a target score was established by adding 24 points — in honor of Bryant, who famously wore No. 24 — to the leading team’s total. For example, if the score after three quarters was 200–196, the first team to reach 224 points would be declared the winner.
Yet again, however, the NBA missed the mark. While the format created some intensity at the very end of the game, players typically only began to truly compete in the final few possessions, leaving much of the rest of the matchup largely uncompetitive and dull.
In 2025, the game changed yet again, featuring a mini-tournament consisting of four teams with eight players each: three teams made up of the 24 NBA All-Star selections and a fourth team composed of the winning squad from the Rising Stars Challenge. There were two semifinal games followed by a final, with each game played to 40 points. Unsurprisingly, the result was more bland basketball that lacked real competition.
When it was announced that the format would return this year with a few minor tweaks, there was significant pushback. For one, it’s confusing. Why are teams playing to 40? Why is there a Rising Stars team involved? What exactly is the selection process for players?
This year, the NBA separated the three All-Star teams into two teams made up exclusively of U.S. players and one team composed of international players, although 12 players per conference were still initially selected as All-Stars. With each tournament team consisting of only eight players, this raises an important question: If there are more than eight deserving international players, do some inevitably get snubbed simply because of roster construction?
The league’s solution was that if the player pool did not reflect the 16–8 split, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver would name additional players to meet the required minimum of 16 U.S. players and eight international players. Regardless, this system is far too complicated for the average fan to follow, and the NBA has yet to realize that simplicity is key in situations like this.
The format also complicates injury replacements. When the NBA replaces an injured All-Star, the league must select someone who fits a specific team designation rather than simply choosing the most deserving replacement based on conference or performance. For example, when it was announced two weeks ago that 2024–25 MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander would miss the game, the NBA selected Turkish center Alperen Şengün as his replacement. However, if the league believed Derrick White was more deserving of an All-Star nod, it would not have been able to choose him under this format because he is American. Similarly, when Giannis Antetokounmpo announced he would not play in the game, De’Aaron Fox was added to Team USA, and Norman Powell was shifted from Team USA to the international team due to his ‘ties to Jamaica.’ Once again, the process appears to lack consistency or clear reasoning, leaving fans with little understanding of how decisions are actually being made.
The NBA needs to determine how to keep the game, the selection process and everything surrounding the weekend as simple as possible. Making fans read through pages of rules and sift through unnecessary minutiae does not create an ideal experience for the league or its audience. That should be the first priority. Whether it means returning to a traditional All-Star Game or developing a new alternative, the format needs to be easy to follow. No more target scores, replacing players based on nationality rather than merit or including Rising Stars teams.
After solving that issue, the next step has to be improving the entertainment value of the event — nothing gimmicky, but also nothing that puts the players at significant injury risk. The NFL’s solution to the Pro Bowl addressed injury concerns by shifting from a regular game to flag football, but it has been of little interest to fans. Another approach would be what MLB once used, awarding home-field advantage in the World Series to the winning league. MLB used this incentive for 13 years but eliminated it in 2016 after negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement with the players. This likely wouldn’t work in the NBA, as the risk of injury is too high, and much like the MLB, players wouldn’t want such high stakes in a game decided by unfamiliar lineups, random rotations and limited chemistry.
There needs to be some balance, but fan enjoyment should be the top priority. Many fans have suggested a one-on-one tournament. The incentive is built in: These players all have massive egos and wouldn’t want to be embarrassed in a head-to-head matchup. Anthony Edwards would take every matchup personally and would surely want to assert dominance over other players. While it could easily fall into the same trap as the regular All-Star Game if players didn’t fully buy in, it may still be an idea worth exploring.
Either way, what we saw this weekend cannot become the long-term status quo. There needs to be meaningful change to the format of the game for the sake of the fans, and that change will ultimately have to come from Commissioner Adam Silver. If the NBA wants All-Star weekend to matter again, it needs to prioritize clarity and true competition.
