Adam Silver Offers Blunt Assessment of 2025's Much-Maligned All-Star Format

The NBA commissioner discussed the league's thinking.

Adam Silver speaks before this year's All-Star Game. / Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images

The NBA—a league not used to losing PR wars to other leagues—lost one in February.

That month, the league offered a gimmicky All-Star spectacle in San Francisco that won considerable criticism. Meanwhile, pundits tripped over themselves to praise the NHL for successfully staging a widely discussed midseason international tournament, the 4-Nations Face-off.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver appears to have heard the criticism, and deemed the format change "a miss" Thursday.

"We're not there, in terms of creating an All-Star experience we can be proud of and our players can be proud of," Silver said in New York as the league's Board of Governors convened.

The 2025 event was a single-elimination four-team tournament, with teams captained by four TNT pundits. Next year, NBC will have the rights to the game—which Silver hopes will help infuse fresh ideas into the event.

"The breaks were too long—and I get it. It was opportunity to celebrate TNT," Silver said. "The long stoppage in play in that final game didn't work for anyone. So we're a bit back to the drawing board."

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