The 2026 NBA All-Star Game will feature a new format with two U.S. teams and one international team competing in a round-robin tournament of 12-minute games.
Each team will feature at least eight players, with Adam Silver selecting additional players if the fan voting doesn’t split up the All-Stars into 16 American players and eight internationals to make up the three teams. A new wrinkle for the voting this year is that players are no longer selected via backcourt and frontcourt designations, which made for some notable results in the first round of fan voting.
Luka Dončić and Giannis Antetokounmpo lead their conferences after the first round of fan voting, with Dončić just edging out Antetokounmpo currently for the most votes overall. Nikola Jokić is close behind in third, meaning the top three vote-getters would all be playing together for the international squad.
In the East voting, the next four spots behind Antetokounmpo are occupied by guards thanks to the new voting system. Tyrese Maxey, Jalen Brunson and Cade Cunningham all topped 1 million votes, with Donovan Mitchell in fifth at just over 851,000.
A notable quirk of the new format is the fact that the U.S. teams seem like they’ll be incredibly light on size. The top American frontcourt players in voting are all wings in Kevin Durant, Jaylen Brown, LeBron James, Jalen Johnson, Michael Porter Jr. and Brandon Ingram.
The international team, meanwhile, would boast the likes of Antetokounmpo, Jokić, Victor Wembanyama, Karl-Anthony Towns and Alperen Sengün — along with Pascal Siakam and Deni Avdija in the top 24. However, their only guards as of now would be Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
We’ll have to wait to see how exactly that all gets sorted out once fan, media and player voting determines the starters and coaches select the reserves, but as it stands now, the U.S. is going to be guard-heavy and the international side will feature most of the size.
