Fans had nothing but bad things to say about this year’s NBA All-Star Game, and the official ratings for the event are painting a very similar picture.
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 report further notes that this year’s iteration was the second-least-watched NBA All-Star Game of all-time, ahead of only 2023 (which averaged 4.6 million viewers). Additionally, the NBA All-Star Game has now gone three straight years of failing to average at least 6 million viewers (after never previously dipping below that threshold in NBA history).
The league decided to go to a gimmicky new mini-tournament format for this year’s All-Star Game, which was held in San Francisco, Calif. But their experimentation ultimately failed to land with the fans, and the non-basketball spectacles that kept on interrupting the actual play made matters far worse.
Many fans complained on social media, calling it the “worst” NBA All-Star Game ever. The extended commercial time, the awkwardly-timed tribute to TNT’s “Inside the NBA” crew right in the middle of the competition (which even had the players openly griping), and the countless cringeworthy moments involving MC Kevin Hart were especially poorly received.
In the wake of the All-Star Game disaster, one top NBA superstar even suggested that All-Star Weekend be cancelled altogether moving forward. While the NBA will obviously never do that, they cannot hide from the fact that fans have lost interest en masse in their increasingly unwatchable All-Star festivities.
