New York-the NBA will not bring its Mini All-Star Game tournament back next season.
Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday that the format used last month: a tournament of four teams composed of 24 All-Stars and another team of rookies and second-year students who played their way by winning the Rising Stars event in All-Star Fridy, with each confrontation playing a game without time with an objective score of 40 points, “it was a failure.” “
“We are not there in terms of creating an All-Star experience of which we can be proud and from which our players can be proud,” said Silver.
The game is changing NBC next season as part of the new league transmission agreement, and Silver said the League and the network are talking about what could work. The League tried something new this season in the hope of generating some competitiveness, that the game has lacked for years.
“We are a little back to the drawing board,” Silver said.
Some players liked the All-Star format this season; others did not; And some did not seem to have much opinion in any way. The tournament was implemented after the All-Star 2024 game saw more points than ever: a final score of 211-186 that established a series of records and essentially was the drop that filled the glass for the league.
“I think it was a good step in the right direction to revitalize the game somehow,” said the MVP All-Star Stephen Curry, of the host Golden State Warriors, after the event last month.
There was a particular element that failed from a competitive point of view this year, which was a long unemployment in the game, almost 20 minutes, during the All-Star championship game to pay tribute to the TNT transmission team that was involved in the broadcast of the game for the last time.
“He was well intentional,” said Silver. “But I think the long stop at play in that final game did not work for anyone.”
The next year’s game will be during the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games, which will be broadcast in the NBC Networks family, so it may seem logical to play that in some way and use some type of international format compared to the United States, which has been spoken in recent years.
The stars game will also be broadcast on NBC, so it will change slightly from a Sunday night to a start of Sunday afternoon on February 15, 2026, from Inglewood, California, and the new home of the Los Angeles clippers.
This movement allows the game to be followed in NBC by its daily prime time program of the Olympic Games in Milan, with the network continuing showing the best live events during the day in NBC, as well as in the entire broadcast of the Live Olympic Games in Peacock.
