With that in mind, you’d think the NBA All-Star game would be the perfect place to execute that thought. Make it about basketball. Cut the fat. Showcase the league’s biggest stars. Somehow, this game did the complete opposite. Instead of being about the basketball, it was all about the fat. The extracurricular turned out to be the game itself.

That number is a 13 percent decrease on the 2024 NBA All-Star Game, which drew 5.398 million viewers. And the numbers get even worse than that. It was the second-least-watched game in the event’s history, according to Front Office Sports, barely beating out the 2023 game, which had about 4.6 million people watching.

Golden State Warriors super star guard Stephen Curry was named the Kobe Bryant Most Valuable Player, his second All-Game MVP Award in the revised 40-point edition of the game, which may or may not catch on. “I am truly honored to win this award in front of my hometown crowd and to share this honor with my teammates,” said Curry.

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.

The NBA is hardly the only major sport whose All-Star Game seems outdated and irrelevant, so it's time to tinker even more.

NBA All-Star Game accomplished its goal of being better basketball, but everything around the games was tough to watch.

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,