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,

The NBA is hardly the only major sport whose All-Star Game seems outdated and irrelevant, so it's time to tinker even more.

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.

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.

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.

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,