In its return to broadcast television on NBC, the revamped NBA All-Star Game bounced back both on the court and off.<\/p>\n
Sunday\u2019s NBA All-Star Game averaged 8.8 million viewers across NBC, Peacock and Telemundo, per a combination of preliminary Nielsen data and Adobe Analytics \u2014 nearly doubling last year\u2019s Nielsen-only audience of 4.7 million on TNT Sports and marking the largest audience for the annual exhibition since 2011 (9.1M). (NBC\u2019s position is that because Nielsen does not track its streaming viewership, its combined Nielsen + Adobe audience figures are comparable to the Nielsen-only figures of other networks.)<\/p>\n
Final figures will not be available until Wednesday due to the Monday holiday.<\/p>\n
The USA vs. the World round-robin, which peaked with 9.8 million in the 7 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the largest audience for any traditional All-Star Game since the Major League Baseball edition drew 9.3 million in 2017. (If one counts last year\u2019s NHL \u201cFour Nations Face-Off\u201d as an All-Star event, the final of that tournament drew 9.3 million.)<\/p>\n
Keep in mind that Nielsen did not track out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100 percent of markets until last year. In addition, Nielsen in September shifted to a new metric that combines \u201cBig Data\u201d from smart TVs and set-top boxes to its traditional panel. Those changes would not explain a year-over-year increase of such size, but will generally skew comparisons to prior years.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s All-Star Game was the first to air on broadcast television since 2002, also on NBC. And just as in 2002, this year\u2019s game was sandwiched between Winter Olympics telecasts in a 5 PM ET Sunday window. (The 2002 game also saw a pronounced viewership bump, benefiting not just from the Winter Olympics but also the presence of Wizards G Michael Jordan.)<\/p>\n
While there were no shortage of complaints on social media about the earlier start time \u2014 and it likely affected in-person attendance in Los Angeles, where the festivities began at 2 PM local time \u2014 5 PM is generally a better start time on Sundays than primetime. (One need only look at the NFL, whose largest audiences in a given week are during the 4:25 PM ET \u201cnational window\u201d rather than \u201cSunday Night Football.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Between the return to broadcast television, the Winter Olympics lead-ins and lead-outs, and the improved timeslot, it is likely the case that literally any version of the NBA All-Star Game \u2014 even a reprise of East 211, West 186 in 2024 \u2014 would have hit a multi-year high.<\/p>\n
But this year\u2019s game likely benefited further from the new \u201cUSA vs. the World\u201d format and the apparent increase in intensity that ensued. The first three quarters \u2014 each of which was a \u2018mini-game\u2019 with a winner and loser \u2014 were tightly contested. That was a far cry from the laid back efforts of recent years, which have been the subject of increasingly overwrought criticism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In its return to broadcast television on NBC, the revamped NBA All-Star Game bounced back both on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3782],"tags":[7,307,152,3954,6,80887,697,353,308],"class_list":{"0":"post-607903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-timberwolves","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-minnesota","10":"tag-minnesota-timberwolves","11":"tag-minnesotatimberwolves","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-nba-all-star-ratings","14":"tag-nba-on-nbc","15":"tag-nba-ratings","16":"tag-timberwolves"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116085569866029374","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}