The NBA All-Star Game — and All-Star weekend as a whole, honestly — is supposed to be one of the best celebrations in sports.
It’s a time when the biggest names of the game of basketball from the past, present and future all come together in one place. It’s an extremely special time for the NBA.
The 2023 All-Star weekend absolutely didn’t feel like it, though. Fans made that abundantly clear by, well, actually not watching the game.
According to data from Paulsen’s Sports Media Watch, the game’s viewership reached record lows over the weekend. Sunday’s contest only saw 4.59 million viewers across TNT and TBS, which was a 27 percent decline from last year according to their data and the steepest decline since the 2000 All-Star game.
“Ratings declined 29% and viewership 27% from last year’s All-Star Game (3.1, 6.28M). While All-Star Game viewership has been trending down, this year’s declines are the steepest for the game since 2000 — the first All-Star Game after a one-year hiatus due to the 1998-99 NBA lockout.”
There are a few factors at work here. The first one is pretty obvious: There was lots of star power missing from the game.
Kevin Durant and Steph Curry were both out from injury. Giannis Antetkounmpo and LeBron James left the game early with injuries of their own. Those are huge losses. That star power is a big part of what brings people to All-Star weekend. Without it, the game can certainly be a tough sell.
The players participating giving the bare minimum effort certainly didn’t help either. People tuned the game out because they had absolutely no reason to tune in. No one wants to watch a “glorified layup line,” as Jaylen Brown described it.
This is a big deal, though. The All-Star game is a huge selling point for the NBA when the league has its television rights negotiations. TNT is reportedly ready to walk away from the league. The league is looking for $50 billion to $75 billion combined from TNT and ESPN in their upcoming television deal, Front Office Sports reported.
It’s a long shot that this actually happens — the NBA is still growing and has an incredible social reach. But the NBA still needs to give its television partners some incentive to stick around. These numbers are not that.
There’s no easy fix for this. You can’t just continuously rule change this lack of effort away. It always resets back to square one.
The only way this changes is if the players — quite literally — make an effort to change it. It’s on them. We’ll see if it happens.
