The NBA All-Star game is where the greatest basketball athletes can show off their skills vs one another. So what's wrong with it you may ask? It's simple, it's not competitive anymore. Back in the early 2000s it was all the All-Stars from the Western Conference, “The Best From The West,” versus the All-Stars from the Eastern Conference, “The Beasts From The East.” But now we have teams putting up 200 points in the “big game” which shows the lack of defense and will of the players.
Even the Superstar Luka Doncic was chucking up full-court prayers before the game was even over. The NBA announced that at the start of the 2018 regular season, they would switch the format to a type of Captain format where the two players who were voted to be the captains would be their own team just like you would if you were playing kickball with your friends.
This seemed like such a cool new way for the All-Star game to run because now fans could watch guys who would usually be separated due to conferences suit up together. But this new way did nothing for the fans as the NBA saw a decrease in viewership by 100K going from 7.8 million to 7.7. Compare that to what it was like at the start of 2003 when the NBA was pulling over 10 million people for the All-Star Game! After that, the inevitable happened viewership in 2019 the year after dropped by 900K viewers, and in 2020 viewership went back up to 7.3 million a 500K viewership increase, but compared to the years before it was not the help the NBA was expecting. Then in 2024, the league switched back to the old version of West vs East, but the NBA saw another huge drop of only 5.5 million viewers; this was the second lowest the All-Star game has ever seen the next lowest was the year before in 2023 with only 4.6 million viewers! Even in one quick Google search of the “NBA All-Star Game,” anyone can see that no one likes it, and even one fan on Reddit said, “The NBA All-Star Game has just become unwatchable at this point”. So when the NBA spends millions of dollars on a game where there is no defense, no effort, no care, and no competition can you even call it a game at this point?