2024 NBA All-Star Game

Result

MVP: Damian Lillard

The format reverted to the traditional East vs. West conference game after years of criticism that the draft-format games lacked competitiveness — yet this game set a new All-Star scoring record (397 combined points) anyway, becoming the first team to top 200 points.

Box score

Format reverted to the traditional East vs. West conference game. Set a new All-Star Game scoring record (211 points).

Bench (10+ points): Jaylen Brown (36), Scottie Barnes (16), Jalen Brunson (12), Tyrese Maxey (10)

Bench (10+ points): Karl-Anthony Towns (50), Stephen Curry (16), Devin Booker (15), Paul George (13)

Game context

The 2024 All-Star Game, played February 18 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, marked the league's return to the traditional East-versus-West conference format after six seasons of the captain's draft, a reversal driven by years of criticism that the draft-format games — and the Elam Ending fourth quarter in particular — had drifted into essentially defense-optional exhibitions with little competitive stake. The irony was immediate and widely remarked upon: freed from the draft format but still without any format-imposed defensive incentive, the East and West produced the single highest-scoring All-Star Game in NBA history, with the East winning 211-186 for a combined 397 points, shattering the previous record of 374 set back in the 2017 game. The East's 211 points also made it the first team ever to surpass 200 points in a single All-Star Game, an offensive tally that underscored just how far scoring norms in the exhibition had drifted from the sport's competitive game even independent of which team-selection format was used. Damian Lillard, making his first All-Star start, won the game's MVP award and became the first player in NBA history to win both the Three-Point Contest and the All-Star Game MVP in the same weekend, a notable individual double that capped a strong showing across the entire event for the Milwaukee Bucks guard. The East built a commanding lead early, entering halftime up 104 points with the two teams having combined for 193 points by the break — itself a new All-Star halftime scoring record, surpassing the previous mark of 191. The East also set a game record with 42 made three-pointers, part of a combined 67 threes between both teams, reflecting how thoroughly the modern three-point revolution had reshaped even exhibition basketball. The reversion to East-versus-West preserved some elements introduced during the draft-format years, including charity-linked scoring incentives tied to quarterly performance, but restored four full 12-minute quarters played on a running clock and abandoned the untimed Elam Ending, returning to a standard clock-based structure for the whole game rather than just the first three quarters. The result — a record-breaking, defensively indifferent rout in the league's first attempt to restore the older, more traditional format — became a significant talking point in ongoing debates about how to make the All-Star Game more competitive, and it directly foreshadowed the league's next, more radical experiment: scrapping the two-team format altogether the following year in favor of the four-team, target-score mini-tournament debuted in 2025. Indianapolis's hosting of the game also carried its own local significance, coming as part of a broader wave of the NBA rotating All-Star Weekend through mid-sized markets in the 2020s rather than concentrating the event solely in the league's largest media centers, following stops in cities like Cleveland, Salt Lake City, and Charlotte in the surrounding seasons. Coming one year after Tatum's individual 55-point outburst in the format's final draft-era edition, the 2024 game demonstrated that abandoning the draft structure alone did nothing to rein in scoring, since the underlying incentive problem — All-Star participants generally declining to play meaningful defense in a nominally consequence-free exhibition — persisted regardless of how teams were selected, a lesson the league would explicitly try to address with the following year's tournament format.

Sources

• Basketball-Reference — NBA All-Star Game History
• NPR — NBA All-Star Game: East beat the West 211-186. Did fans watch the defense-less game?