The NBA is taking a page from the NHL for its next All-Star Game.
Commissioner Adam Silver today indicated that his league would be going to a USA vs. the world concept for the 2026 competition.
Asked on FS1’s Breakfast Ball broadcast this morning whether the NBA would adopt something akin to the NHL’s very successful “us vs. them” format, Silver responded, “Yes.”
The commissioner noted that the next All-Star Game, given the league’s new media deal with NBC, “will be smack in the middle of” that network’s Winter Olympics coverage. That’s a great time to play on national identity.”
He continued: “The very day we’re on, the lead-in will be Winter Olympic events. Ang then coming out of the All-Star Game — which is now in the afternoon instead of the evening — will be more Winter Olympic events. What better time to feature USA vs. the world?”
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Silver then hedged a bit.
“I’m not exactly sure what the format will be yet,” he said. “I paid a lot of attention to what the NHL did, which was a huge success.”
The NHL first featured All-Star teams consisting of North Americans and a team of stars from the rest of the world in 1998. Not coincidentally, that matchup also took place during the Winter Olympics. The configuration lasted until 2002, after which the league went to conference-vs.-conference matchups. In 2025, however, the NHL hosted a new exhibition tournament known as the 4 Nations Face-Off, with teams of NHL players representing Canada, Finland, Sweden and the U.S. in competition. The format turned out to be not just wildly competitive but also wildly popular. Stateside, the championship game in which Canada beat the U.S. on a Connor McDavid overtime goal was seen by an average of 9.3 million viewers, eclipsing Game 7 of the 2019 Stanley Cup Final as the fourth-highest-rated NHL telecast of all time.
Over on the hardwood, basketball fans long have bemoaned the lost opportunity that is the NBA All-Star Game. The league never has had more talent, yet putting the best players on the same court at the same time has produced yawn-inducing results.
For instance, the East-West faceoff in 2024 produced a 25-point blowout by the East and an eye-popping final score of 211-186. By comparison, the average score in a regular-season game that year was 114 points, meaning none of the All-Stars cared enough to play defense. The 2025 competition had the second-lowest viewership in history, averaging 4.7 million viewers across TNT platforms. That’s a 13% decrease year-over-year.
Silver has been experimenting with different formats to try to amp up the competitiveness, among them having two stars — e.g. LeBron James and Stephen Curry — each pick a team. The outcomes mostly have been lackluster and certainly not on par with the level of talent in the league.
Significant among that talent surge have been foreign players such as Victor Wembanyama from France, Nicola Jokic from Serbia, Giannis Antetokounmpo from Greece and Luka Doncic from Slovenia. In fact, six of the league’s past seven MVPs have been foreign-born.
Silver is not averse to trying new things. He debuted the league’s in-season NBA Cup tournament in 2023. The Lakers victory over the Pacers in the championship game raked in 4.58M viewers on ABC and ESPN2, making it the most-watched game during the regular season in nearly six years (since February 2018), excluding Christmas Day. It also created a whole new raft of premium sponsorship and ad opportunities for the league and its broadcast partner.
Now, Silver hopes to do the same for the league’s longsuffering All-Star Game.
