NBA and WNBA All-Star events have been going through a bit of a revamp in recent years. With increasing sponsorships, NBA salaries, and a decline in fan attention span, the NBA All-Star Game in particular has flopped in viewership and overall cultural resonance. It’s hard to get players to compete at 100% when they are afraid of being injured, and when there is little incentive to do so. Especially when it comes to events like the 3-point shooting contest, skills contest, or whatever other event the NBA tries to think up to change things up. WNBA players can be motivated by $25,000 prizes, of course, given their salaries are lower than those of NBA players, but NBA players are too well-compensated to really care about that kind of stuff anymore.
Only WNBA players can save NBA All-Star Weekend
The Steph vs Sabrina 3-point contest drove engagement but hasn’t been repeated since.
A few years ago, the NBA made a huge step in re-engaging fans in All-Star events by holding a shooting contest between Stephen Curry and Sabrina Ionescu in 2024. While some “battle of the sexes” type events can quickly devolve into questionable territory, ripe for sexist online takes and poor analysis, this event was actually quite well done. Ionescu and Curry are two of the best shooters in the sport’s history, and also great friends, so there was a mutual respect that ran through the lead-up to the event and the event itself.
Since it was a standard 3-point shooting contest, it wasn’t like Ionescu was at a huge disadvantage for being a woman. She was able to shoot from the WNBA three-point line (22 feet, 1.75 inches from the basket) if she wanted, but opted to use the standard NBA three-point line (23 feet, 9 inches from the basket) instead — a distance she is more than comfortable making shots from.
All of the prize money from this contest was being donated to charity, with Ionescu and Curry each pledging donations to their own personal foundations. The event was also in reaction to Sabrina Ionescu breaking the all-time 3-point contest record, NBA or WNBA, at the previous year’s WNBA All-Star Game. At the time, fans wondered how Ionescu would fare against the NBA’s best shooters — this event gave those fans what they wanted.
The event was a massive success, achieving the highest NBA All-Star Saturday viewership numbers in over five years, with over 5 million viewers. It outperformed the main event of the weekend, the actual All-Star Game, and viewership peaked during that event in particular. While Ionescu lost to Curry 29-26, her 26 points matched the actual winner of that year’s NBA 3-point shooting contest, and while she definitely didn’t need to gain any respect from the NBA contingent, she did.
Afterward, many people expressed genuine interest and excitement in repeating the event. At the time, Caitlin Clark was still in college, but fans were frothing at the mouth at the idea of seeing her compete in a 3-point contest. There were ideas of Steph and Sabrina going up against Clark and another NBA shooting star like Damian Lillard. Yet, years later, none of that has come to fruition.
Plus, two seasons into her career, Caitlin Clark has yet to compete in a 3-point contest.
In the summer of 2024, Ionescu bowed out of the WNBA All-Star 3-point contest to focus more on the upcoming Paris Olympics the week after — super fair. That same year, Clark declined an invitation to the contest as well, saying she wanted to rest after playing for over a year of consecutive basketball.
When it came to the following NBA All-Star game, in 2025, Clark declined an invitation from the NBA to participate. According to reporting from The Athletic, Clark wanted her first WNBA All-Star 3-point shooting contest to be in the WNBA.
The 2025 WNBA All-Star game was held in Clark’s WNBA home of Indianapolis, Indiana, where she plays with the Indiana Fever. A perfect spot to make her first appearance in the event, but those hopes were dashed as Clark suffered numerous injuries in the summer of 2025, leading to her missing most of the season and the All-Star game.
Now, as we head into the 2026 NBA All-Star game, the hype of Steph vs Sabrina is two years old, and with nothing to replace it. Fans would surely show up in the same fashion for a Caitlin Clark-led 3-point contest, which would definitely help the NBA’s floundering All-Star Weekend viewership numbers. Yet, nothing of the sort has materialized in the nearly two years since Clark came onto the scene, and this year was likely impossible as the NBA battles with WNBA players over their next CBA.
Still, it’s pretty wild that the NBA found a solid way to drive engagement, bring in the WNBA fanbase, and provide some tangible excitement for the All-Star events… and just hasn’t repeated it since. Add it to the list of self-inflicted L’s in the Adam Silver era.
