Commercials nearly doubled game time during NBA All-Star Game

If the new NBA All-Star Game wasn’t already bad enough, now there’s some hard data to prove it.

According to one Reddit user’s post on the NBA subreddit, just 42 minutes of actual basketball were played during TNT’s three hour broadcast window of the All-Star Game on Sunday night. That compares to 80 minutes of ads and 88 minutes of other programming, such as TNT’s pre and postgame studio commentary and a Mr. Beast challenge.

The tournament was an excellent format, and TNT and the NBA ruined it pic.twitter.com/2dycn2kxRz

— Cameron Tabatabaie (@CTabatabaie) February 17, 2025

Suffice it to say, that’s not really a recipe to keep viewers engaged for what has turned out to be one of the worst All-Star Games of all time. Given the format change, which saw four teams compete in a bracket-style competition where games were played to 40 points, actual game time decreased substantially from prior years.

The old format, which was played with traditional 12-minute quarters, featured a minimum of 48 minutes of game play; though that likely extended out to about an hour when accounting for stoppages like free throws. The new format left plenty of dead air for TNT to wax poetic about Inside the NBA, despite the fact that it’ll still be on the air next season, and allow Draymond Green and Charles Barkley to go at it over whose fault it is that the current All-Star Game sucks.

There’s no easy fix to the NBA’s problem here. Unless you can get players to buy-in, like the NHL seemingly has, this negative news cycle will repeat every year until the league either does away with the game entirely, or finds a format that works.

But if there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that nobody is going to watch if there’s only 42 minutes of actual basketball over a three hour broadcast.