NBA: 2020 All-Star Game TV audience up 8% with introduction of the new "Elam Ending" format

The 2020 NBA All-Star Game, played at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, drew an average of 7.3 million viewers in the United States on the pay-TV channel TNT belonging to the North American broadcasting group Turner, on Sunday 15/02/2020 (at 18:10 US East Coast time, 02:10 CET D+1), according to data from the Nielsen Institute.

This figure represented an 8% increase over the 2019 NBA All-Star Game (6.8 million viewers) following the new format introduced in the last quarter, the "Elam Ending" from street basketball competitions. Held each summer in the United States, The Basketball Tournament is the first high-profile competition to introduce the Elam Ending format at the end of each game. The principle is to reset the score after each quarter and to have a target score at the end of the game.

For the 2020 edition of the competition, the NBA decided to mix the new format with a tribute to Kobe Bryant, who passed away after a helicopter crash on January 26/01/2020. The "Final Target Score" was "determined by taking the leading team's total cumulative score through three quarters…