The 2025 NBA All-Star Game accomplished its goal of being better basketball, but everything around the games was tough to watch.
After another poorly received All-Star Game, thee NBA’s new mini-tournament format might not be here to last. That is perhaps a bit of a shame because league’s latest attempt to create a more entertaining and competitive All-Star Game was reasonably successful in terms of the basketball we saw on the court.
The first two games were competitive and saw all four teams showing honest to god effort on both ends of the floor at times and looked like actual basketball games. The final game saw Shaq’s OGs jump out to a quick 11-0 lead on Chuck’s Global Stars and then devolved into the type of low-stakes basketball we’ve come to expect from the All-Star Game. The good news is, in a game to 40, even a bad game goes quickly. You get a guy to catch fire like Stephen Curry (trying harder than most in his home All-Star Game), hitting a halfcourt shot and some silly threes, and it’s enough to make things reasonably entertaining and ends quickly without falling into total chaos.
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The problem with the 2025 All-Star Game had little to do with the quality of basketball on the court, which is perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay to the new format. The issue was that three games to 40 in an All-Star atmosphere go extremely quickly and the TV broadcast is determined to fill a three-hour window.
That meant we were treated to some truly dreadful segments, including an inordinate amount of Kevin Hart (in case you were not aware, Kevin is very short and NBA players are quite tall) and Damian Lillard having to purposefully try to miss enough logo threes to let a fan win $100,000 from Mr.
