With that in mind, you’d think the NBA All-Star game would be the perfect place to execute that thought. Make it about basketball. Cut the fat. Showcase the league’s biggest stars. Somehow, this game did the complete opposite. Instead of being about the basketball, it was all about the fat. The extracurricular turned out to be the game itself.

The basketball, the little that we saw played, at the 2025 NBA All-Star Game(s) on Sunday in San Francisco was — relative to past years — actually entertaining. Even with a couple of superstars sitting out due to last-minute injuries,

Golden State Warriors super star guard Stephen Curry was named the Kobe Bryant Most Valuable Player, his second All-Game MVP Award in the revised 40-point edition of the game, which may or may not catch on. “I am truly honored to win this award in front of my hometown crowd and to share this honor with my teammates,” said Curry.

The NBA is hardly the only major sport whose All-Star Game seems outdated and irrelevant, so it's time to tinker even more.

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,