The NBA is considering another change to the format of its All-Star Game — and this time, there could be an international twist.
Commissioner Adam Silver and Byron Spruell, the NBA’s president of league operations, both acknowledged Monday that the league is having discussions with the NBA Players Association and broadcast partner NBC over replacing the All-Star Game’s current format with an international competition next season.
“Our All-Star Game will return to NBC next season in the middle of their coverage of the Winter Olympics,” Silver told The Athletic. “Given the strong interest we’ve seen in international basketball competitions, most recently in last summer’s Olympics in Paris, we’re discussing concepts with the players association that focus on NBA players representing their countries or regions instead of the more traditional formats that we’ve used in the past.”
Earlier Monday, Spruell told The Associated Press that the NBA is mulling “formats that lean into this idea of international play, to some extent leaning a little bit on this idea of U.S. versus rest of the world.”
“NBC is very much leaning into it, given their role — we are, as well,” Spruell added, according to The Athletic. “Looking to do something new and different yet again, but excited about the possibility.”
The 2026 All-Star Game will be played in Los Angeles at the Intuit Dome, the new home of the LA Clippers, on Feb. 15. The game, which will be aired on NBC, will shift from a Sunday evening to a Sunday afternoon start time, which will allow NBC to directly follow the game with its daily Winter Olympics prime-time show in Milan.
Silver told the AP on Monday that “it’s not lost on us” that the All-Star Game will be played amid the Winter Olympic coverage — as well as at the location of the 2028 Summer Games.
“We’ll be competing in the arena at Intuit, where the basketball competition will take place in the 2028 Olympics,” Silver said. “So I think all of those factors, when they come together, it presents an enormous opportunity for us to do something with an international competition instead of the traditional All-Star formats that we’ve used.”
Multiple NBA star players — including Giannis Antetokounmpo, Victor Wembanyama and Draymond Green — voiced their support for an international competition earlier this year during this season’s All-Star weekend.
The NBA also announced last month that it would not bring back the mini-tournament format used at this season’s All-Star Game. Silver referred to the mini-tournament as “a miss” at the time of the announcement, adding that the league was “not there in terms of creating an All-Star experience that we can be proud of and our players can be proud of.”
The NBA says about 70% of players in the league are American, meaning it therefore will be easier for international players to make an All-Star roster in a U.S. vs. the world-style competition.
But Antetokounmpo, Wembanyama, Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Pascal Siakam and Alperen Sengun all were All-Stars this season, while Luka Doncic also is almost always an All-Star lock as well. Karl-Anthony Towns plays internationally for the Dominican Republic — his mother’s homeland — so a potential international roster would have those eight players as a base.
“The USA has more talented players than the rest of the world,” Jokic, the three-time MVP from Serbia, said earlier this year. “Europe and the rest of the world has talented players, I think, but the majority of the players are coming from USA.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
