This originally appeared in Tuesday morning’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.
The NBA All-Star Game drew 8.8 million viewers Sunday night, an 87% increase over last year’s disaster on TNT and the best audience the game has posted in 15 years. The new USA vs. World format created actual stakes that players cared about, the basketball was competitive for three hours, and viewership nearly doubled. That should be the entire story.
Instead, by Monday evening, a significant chunk of the sports media discourse had moved on to explaining why these numbers don’t actually mean anything. The Olympics lead-in did all the work, they said. NBC handed the NBA a larger audience. The 5 p.m. Sunday timeslot artificially inflated the audience. The network’s programming schedule deserves credit, not Adam Silver’s format overhaul.
The problem with this argument isn’t that the Olympics lead-in didn’t help — of course it helped. NBC scheduled the All-Star Game immediately after figure skating, specifically because they knew millions of people would already be watching. The problem is that nobody ever applies this level of scrutiny to any other sport when they benefit from strong lead-ins.
I’ve never seen more people make note of an event losing audience from its lead-in — crickets when Duke-Arkansas lost literally 50 million viewers from Chiefs-Cowboys. The Olympics itself lost 100 million from its Super Bowl lead-in one week earlier. Who *ever* cares about that?
— Sports Media Watch (@paulsen_smw) February 16, 2026
Only the NBA has to prove its ratings are legitimate before anyone will acknowledge that something worked. Only the NBA gets the “well, actually” treatment, where every success requires context explaining why it doesn’t really count. And the reason is that many people have spent years insisting the NBA product is broken and that the ratings decline is permanent, so when the All-Star Game nearly doubles its audience in one year, the narrative needs protecting.
The afternoon timeslot that everyone initially complained about as proof NBC was burying the game to protect Olympics coverage turned out to be one of the highest-rated windows for sports on broadcast television. CBS and Fox both put their biggest NFL regional games at 4:25 p.m. ET because that window consistently outperforms primetime. NBC knew exactly what they were doing scheduling the All-Star Game there, and it worked.
The NBA improved the product, and NBC gave them the platform to showcase it. Both things can be true simultaneously. Lead-ins help every sport that gets them, but they don’t create audiences for unwatchable content. The All-Star Game drew 8.8 million viewers because the format worked and players competed, not just because figure skating ended right before it started.
This doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. The All-Star Game was a ratings embarrassment for years. Adam Silver completely overhauled the format despite everyone insisting nothing would fix it. Players bought into the new structure. Viewership responded. NBC scheduled it well. That’s a win for everyone involved, and sometimes you can just let something be a win without immediately searching for reasons why it doesn’t count.
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