
by Henry Liao
The 2026 NBA All-Star Game, with a novel format, will be held at the state-of-the-art Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, on February 16, Manila time.
It will feature three teams of at least eight players each. Two of them will be made up of players from the U.S. (Americans), and a third will be composed of international players or from the rest of the world.
Ideally, of the 24 total All-Star roster spots, 16 of them will be U.S. players and eight of them will be international players, who, if necessary, can be American players with ties to other countries.
In the event this criterion is not met, NBA commissioner Adam Silver will be the one to select additional All-Stars to meet the requirement.
In a scenario where there’s a 15–9 result, Silver will pick a 16th U.S. player while keeping the team of international players intact at nine, resulting in a 25-man All-Star Game.
With three teams, there will be three games, round-robin style, followed by the championship game.
Team A will play Team B in Game 1. The winner of that game will play Team C in Game 2. The loser of Game 1 will play Team C in Game 3.
The teams with the best two records will play in the championship game. If all three teams are 1–1, point differential would be the tiebreaker.
Games will have one standard NBA quarter, or 12 minutes long.
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