Just three nights before the NBA All-Star Game, an event which over the last 20 years has become a sort of living monument to half-assery, the league slapped the Utah Jazz with a $500,000 fine for tanking. The weekend ended with an entertaining display of the sort of effort that’s been absent for so long from the annual exhibition, and while these two things aren’t necessarily related, Sunday’s showcase suggests that even the league’s seemingly most intractable flaws might be remediable.
The step-up in showmanship may have been a function of youthful exuberance—Victor Wembanyama set the tone by playing as if he were battling through some sort of Hunger Games scenario—or the adoption of the new USA vs. World format, but whatever the case, the takeaway from the Sunday scrimmage is that the league may have stumbled onto a fix for All-Star apathy. In place of the usual phoning-it-in, actual basketball was played at the Intuit Dome, the kind with defense and the occasional hard foul. If the intensity wasn’t necessarily up there with Dwyane Wade busting Kobe Bryant’s nose in 2012, this was still a massive step-up from the 211-186 result of two years ago.
The preliminary deliveries for this year’s All-Star Game nearly doubled the turnout for the 2025 scrimmage, averaging 8.8 million viewers across the NBC flagship, Peacock and Telemundo. That marks the biggest TV turnout for the game since 2011—and underscores why there’s no excuse for the NBA to squander its annual midwinter opportunity.
People watch more television in January and February than they do during any other stretch of the calendar, and while overall consumption of linear TV continues to erode, the first two months of the year remain the most effective window through which to reach a big audience. In the last decade, HUT levels (Nielsen jargon for “homes using television”) have plummeted 48%, from 56.7 in 2015 to 31.3 in 2024. And while winter watching has weathered a proportionate decline, bragging rights for prime usage continues to ping pong back and forth between January and February. When the days are short and the weather serves as a disincentive for leaving the house, U.S. TV consumption is nearly 20% higher than it is during the dog days of July.
Indeed, February is such a marquee time for TV-watching that it’s still one of the four months that Nielsen sets aside for sweeps. (While continuous data collection has lessened the significance of those quarterly surveys, sweeps remain integral at the affiliate level.) That the midway point of the NBA season has always coincided with February sweeps made for a perfect storm of opportunity for the All-Star Game, which gave even casual basketball fans an excuse to huddle around the tube during a dormant period for televised sports.
The NBA itself played a crucial (if passive) role in the development of a new strain of broadcast programming in the mid-1970s, when CBS usurped the league’s rights package from legacy partner ABC. In the absence of pro hoops, ABC found itself with a ragged hole in its Sunday afternoon schedule, which an exec named Dick Button proposed to fill by way of a new show titled The Superstars. A two-time Olympic gold medalist, Button pitched a concept that would pit some of the day’s most celebrated athletes against each other in a decathlon-style series of sporting events.
The novelty of letting jocks try their hand at unfamiliar pursuits often made for compelling TV. In an early installment of Superstars, Smokin’ Joe Frazier memorably doggie-paddled his way to a last-place finish in a 50-meter swimming heat, only to reveal in a post-race interview that he had never learned how to swim.
Superstars was an instant success, and as the legendary Don Ohlmeyer recalled in a 2004 interview, ABC “kicked the NBA’s tail for three or four years” thanks to the show. “The first weekend, Superstars did an 18 rating at 1 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon,” Ohlmeyer said. “The NBA did a 3.”
Superstars gave rise to an even bigger hit in the sweeps-tailored showcase Battle of the Network Stars. Rather than world-class athletes, ABC elected to pit the show ponies of its primetime entertainment lineup against the stars of the dramas and comedies that aired on CBS and NBC. Hosted by Monday Night Football’s Howard Cosell, Battle of the Network Stars was such a product of its era that the show’s entire run now seems like some kind of weird fever dream.
A bit of context for those who didn’t experience the Me Decade first-hand: The year is 1976. America is in thrall to Fonzie, Bazooka Joe and Quaaludes. Everything is molded of orange or brown polymers, the closest thing we have to the internet is CB radio and our collective lust for folly is insatiable.
Now, a lot of the stuff that aired on TV at the time was informed by a sensibility that wouldn’t fly in our more-enlightened present. Cosell, for want of a better word, could be icky, especially around young actresses. During one installment of Battle, the sportscaster breezily referred to Three’s Company star Joyce Dewitt as “a diminutive bundle of instant sexuality.” Yipes, Howard. And if the things that came out of Cosell’s mouth during the dunk tank and swimming segments weren’t sufficiently dicey, many of the New York-based actors (looking at you, Telly Savalas and Pat Harrington) peppered their on-screen commentary with jokey ethnic slurs.
Battle was a massive hit, and when the follow-up special aired during February sweeps in 1977, ABC drew a 28.8 rating. Nearly half (45%) of all TVs in use tuned to ABC during the second installment, and while there were only two other options at the time (or three, if you include whatever ghostly signal you might manage to scare up on the UHF dial), Battle put up numbers that even today’s NFL would kill for. The show was so big that ABC soon began emulating the Roman numeral naming convention of the Super Bowl, and by the time the concept had run its course, the Battle franchise closed out in 1988 just shy of the XX mark.
But for the ninth broadcast, which aired in December 1980, every Battle was staged during sweeps, where it helped boost the affiliates’ all-important quarterly ratings sample. Even toward the end of its run, Battle was still commanding a 30 share.
And while it may seem odd that CBS and NBC would agree to allow their own talent to generate big ratings points for rival ABC, the enterprise was a tremendously efficient cross-promotional vehicle for all parties concerned. Of course, such cooperation would be unthinkable today. Setting aside the unfeasibility of insuring the talent, there’s the matter of what amounts to a mutual-exclusion policy. The only time you’ll ever the letters “ABC” articulated on CBS is if a sitcom character is learning the alphabet or in the run-up to the NFL postseason, when Jim Nantz will give his viewers a heads up about the upcoming playoff game set to kick off a few stops over on the dial.
If there’s a lesson to be extracted from the Battle saga, it’s that TV works best when you take a bunch of familiar elements and plunge them into an environment that is a little unusual. When the genial nebbish from Welcome Back, Kotter can show up the two-fisted tough guy from Baa Baa Black Sheep in a winner-take-all athletic competition and you air that unlikely clash during one of the peak periods for TV consumption, you may have the makings of a big hit. Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game checked a lot of those boxes: Stars vs. Stripes, USA vs. World, and a lot of guys not named Nikola Jokić actually making an effort. (Although Jokić’s apathy would probably melt if the NBA would let him play while riding a horse.)
That combination of novelty and giving a damn is what made Battle a hit for Ohlmeyer, who would later credit the Gabe Kaplan-Robert Conrad blowup (and subsequent footrace) from the premiere with making people want to tune in for future installments. “It made it apparent to the viewer that these people really cared whether they won or lost, and that set the right tenor,” Ohlmeyer said. (It didn’t hurt that the winners took home $20,000 a head, or a little more than $112,000 in today’s currency.)
The content may have been problematic by today’s standards, but no one involved in the making of Battle of the Network Stars ever tanked. They fought like hell for the ego boost and the extra dough and because not trying wasn’t something that was done back then, especially not in front of Cosell and an audience of tens of millions of your fellow Americans. It’s too soon to tell if the NBA has fixed its All-Star Game problem, but if Adam Silver wants to build on the success of this year’s reboot, he could do worse than by gorging on a few episodes of Don Ohlmeyer’s singularly weird TV show.