Please, NBA and MLB: Make U.S.A. vs. the World All-Star Games happen

Yes, the Alabama spring game probably does better ratings than that. And many factors outside the NHL’s control helped create extra interest.

But let’s put the event in context. Thursday’s game drew the highest audience of any hockey game in ESPN’s records. And it demolished the U.S. viewership totals of any recent NHL All-Star Games. According to the Sports Business Journal, the largest American viewership going back to the 2015 All-Star Game was 2.3 million. It was 1.4 million in 2024.

In other words, while it’s clearly not apples to apples, Thursday’s title game had four times the audience of the most-watched NHL All-Star Game of the previous nine. Outside of weeds, rabbits and slang my kids use that I don’t understand, four-fold growth in anything gets your attention. But to achieve that spike for this game, in an era when appetites for All-Star Games in all sports are dropping and causing owners to “crash out” – I think I used it right – is almost unthinkable.

For good measure, it’s worth pointing out that the 9.3 million ESPN audience for the U.S.-Canada final hasn’t been exceeded by an MLB All-Star Game since 2015 (according to Baseball Almanac) and by an NBA All-Star Game since 2003 (per Sports Media Watch).

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred would give his chief lackey’s right arm for 9.3 million viewers.

Deducing that fans would be far more interested in a format in which the league’s stars represented their home nations rather than their conferences or some nonsense entity like Shaq’s OGs was not rocket science, or even introductory astronomy, one of the classes I took in college to satisfy the natural science requirement. (If you want to find the Big Dipper or Orion, I’m your guy. Anything else, I’m sure there’s an app for that.)

All the evidence anyone needs can be found in this event called the Olympics. How many milliseconds of swimming do we watch between Olympiads, even by accident? And yet we become a nation of butterfly-worshipping zealots every four years, pledging violence against anyone who dares to utter a single spoiling word about Katie Ledecky’s 400-meter freestyle before we can go home and watch it on tape delay.

Athletes competing for their countries is a story that’s just hard to resist. If you saw the U.S.-Japan championship game in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, you surely remember the game-deciding at-bat between then-Angels teammates Shohei Ohtani (pitching for Japan) and Mike Trout (at the plate for the U.S.).

If the same matchup were to occur at this year’s All-Star Game – to be held at Truist Park in July, by the way – the moment would be nowhere near as captivating.

U.S.A. vs the World in the NBA or MLB wouldn’t be the Olympics, WBC or even the 4 Nations Face-Off. Those are multi-game events where drama can escalate.

But any compelling moment that a U.S.A.-World game produced would still be better than virtually anything that a normal All-Star Game could generate because there’s nothing on the line in the latter. That’s what fans want to watch – a game that means something.

All-Star Games used to be more popular because star athletes didn’t have the exposure that they do now. But now we can pull up highlights of any player whenever we want. And in baseball, interleague play eliminated the All-Star Game’s novelty of pitting the best players in the American and National leagues against each other.

What we are left with is stars that we already see all the time playing in a game that doesn’t have meaning and that they aren’t especially driven to win. The declining interest is the unsurprising outcome.

International NBA players Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama have already expressed their enthusiasm for the concept. And if the international players are in, that means the Americans had better be ready to compete, too. It would slay. (I think I got that one right.)

U.S. teams for both the NBA and MLB would be deeper, but if you don’t think stars like Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Antetokounmpo (the top four vote getters in 2024 MVP balloting) or Ohtani, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto couldn’t take down their U.S. counterparts – and wouldn’t be motivated to do so – that’s just skibidi. (Pretty sure I’m using that wrong.)

Dončić might even play defense every other possession.

Aside from the fact that the MLB version would probably look like a Dodgers intrasquad game, I don’t see the downside.

In closing, skibidi sigma. (I have no idea what this means).