Star Game mini tournament format may stick around after all. While viewership was down this year as fans and media mocked the first-to-40 scrimmages, which featured the winning team from the Friday night Rising Stars Challenge,

In this year’s All-Star Game, the NBA set up a four-team, single-elimination tournament with a target score of 40 points for each round. Three of the teams consisted of the 24 NBA All-Star selections, while the fourth was the winner of the Rising Stars Challenge.

Front Office Sports reported on Wednesday that the 2025 NBA All-Star Game averaged just 4.7 million viewers across all TNT platforms. That is down 13 percent when compared to last year’s NBA All-Star Game.

For the past few years, the NBA All-Star game has been trending in the wrong direction, but it reached a tipping point last season when the Western Conference defeated the Eastern Conference, 211-186, in a game that broke numerous scoring records.

NBA All-Star Game was a mixed bag, generating fewer viewers than last year, but putting up a record 4.7 billion social media views.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Sports Business Journal. This is just a tiny glimpse of the data available to CivicScience clients. Discover more data. The Sunday after the Super Bowl brought another marquee sporting event – the NBA All-Star Game.

The NBA experimented with a new format for the All-Star Game this year after criticism of the traditional East-West game. Fans and analysts complained that the regular game had degraded into a glorified layup line,