The NHL scored big by going global to fight midseason doldrums, leaving North America’s other major pro sports leagues to ponder what they could do to re-energize their dreary all-star breaks.

Hockey’s top league spent its February All-Star break staging the 4 Nations Face-off, a seven-game competition featuring national teams of the United States, Canada, Sweden and Finland that was a wild success for hockey die–hards and new followers of the sport.

Canada won the tournament with a thrilling overtime victory over the United States in a championship matchup that was watched by 16.1 million viewers in North America — 9.3 million in the United States and 6.3 million in Canada.

That made for the second-most watched hockey game in the past decade, trailing only Game 7 of last year’s Stanley Cup Final.

“It was just the best example of pent-up demand for some great international play on the big stage with the big guns,” said Lauren Anderson, director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.

So can other leagues stage their versions of hockey’s 4 Nations? Anderson is skeptical.

“I worry that everybody’s going to see the success of 4 Nations and everybody’s going to try and run to do something, and it’s not going to be special,” she said. “It’s not going to be high-quality.”

Fans and players alike criticized last week’s NBA All-Star weekend, and it showed in the ratings. The game drew only 4.7 million viewers, according to Front Office Sports, down 13% year over year. It was the second-lowest All-Star Game in the last 25 years.

ESPN NHL analyst P.K. Subban said much of that is based on the effort NBA players put into it.

4 Nations “was the most viewed game that we’ve had in years,” Subban said. “It’s because it’s not just based on the skill and talent. It’s based on the pride, honor, playing for the guy next to you. I got a question for the NBA players — what the hell are you playing for? What are you playing for?”

Fordham University professor Mark Conrad said he hopes other leagues can someday reformat their all-star games to something more compelling than their current products.

“Those [the NBA and pre-4 Nations NHL all-star games] are jokes, and the Pro Bowl is idiotic,” said Conrad, who teaches sports law at Fordham’s business school.

MLB already has World Baseball Classic

Baseball officials would suggest they don’t need to stage a midseason international tournament since they already have the World Baseball Classic, which brought the planet’s best to springtime competition in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2023.

The next tournament will be in March 2025.

Organizers of 4 Nations benefited from having nearly all of the world’s best hockey players already here, punching the clock for North American employers, so a high-level midseason competition wasn’t hard to organize.

A baseball form of 4 Nations probably wouldn’t be able to include three-time WBC champion Japan or Korea, third- and second-place finishers in 2006 and 2009, with those players competing in domestic leagues in July.

The best U.S., Dominican and Venezuelan baseball players are under contract for MLB teams, so a 4 Nations-like competition could be held during the All-Star break, but only with Western Hemisphere teams.

Conrad and Anderson questioned whether games involving teams other than the 2017 champion Americans or the 2023 winning Japanese would be competitive enough to hold viewer interest.

“I don’t know about the competitive balance there’d be between the U.S., Canada, Dominican Republic and Venezuela,” Conrad said. “I think there’s a risk that you may get, like, 15-0 games.”

That would be in contrast to the 4 Nations tournament of close hockey games. Just one of the seven contests was a blowout — the rest were either one-goal games or two-goal games that included empty net scores.

4 Nations’ success “really has to do with how the league is built and the structure of the players,” Anderson said. “No league is built for this the way the NHL is, where you can have four teams that are equally strong and competitive.”

It’s also questionable whether MLB would want to play ball with its union to negotiate for a midseason international competition when an ugly labor battle is expected after the 2026 season.

“Of all of the all-star games out there, the baseball All-Star Game is considered the best,” Conrad said. “You still get reasonably good ratings and it’s not the joke that the NHL and NBA all-star games are. Those are jokes.”

Last season’s MLB All-Star Game drew 7.44 million viewers on Fox, up 6% year over year.

Too much good hoops worldwide

The United States won its fifth consecutive basketball gold medal in Paris last summer, but it was no cakewalk.

The Americans had to rally from a 17-point deficit against Serbia in the semifinals before Steph Curry continued his heroics in a title-game victory over France.

While many of the best international players suit up for NBA clubs, most non-American elites are employed in Europe.

Of the 10 players who took part in Serbia’s bronze-medal-winning game over Germany, six are plying their trade in Europe this season. Of the 12 players who got minutes for France in the gold medal game against the United States, seven are playing this season in Europe.

Conrad, the Fordham professor, said there would be more upside to a midseason international basketball competition than a baseball version of it.

“Basketball is such an international game now, and baseball is not nearly as much,” he said.

Despite a logistical headache of bringing players from Greece, Turkey, Italy, Serbia and other corners of Europe for a potential midseason NBA-led international competition, Conrad said, it’s doable.

“That’d be hard. You’d have to find the time to do it,” he said. “But you know what, if the World Cup can change its schedule in the midst of the soccer schedule, which it did in Qatar, then it can be done. I think there’s a will to do it. It can be done for a very short, intense series. I think it’s very possible.”

Success of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off was in stark contrast to the NBA All-Star Game, which some panned for its confusing format and unserious play.

Anderson argued that the weekend of non-game events plays a key role in pop culture that’s every bit as valuable as any on-the-floor action.

“The NBA All-Star Game, that event is about the influencers,” Anderson said. “It’s about entertainment. It’s about sponsors. It’s really about everything that’s going on around the weekend.”

The Pro Bowl is dead and gone

Football, of course, is a uniquely American sport, so international play isn’t a real option.

And given the brutal physical nature of football, adding an extra game that doesn’t lead to the Super Bowl is probably a nonstarter.

Player apathy and half-speed play finally forced the league to conclude it could no longer go on with the charade of a normal game. So since Feb. 5, 2023, the Pro Bowl has been a contact-free flag football game.

Conrad said he doesn’t believe there’d be much fan outcry if the NFL and the NBA just did away with their all-star game events all together.

“The Pro Bowl is idiotic, and they’re trying to come up with new ways and gimmicks,” Conrad said. “So it’d be easier to chuck them. I don’t think the world would be unhappy if you chucked them.”

Any football fan under the age of 60 would struggle to recall that the NFL once staged a third-place game, the Playoff Bowl, featuring the semifinal losers playing the weekend before the Super Bowl.

The Playoff Bowl “wasn’t meaningless, but it was almost meaningless,” said former Green Packers split end Boyd Dowler, a two-time Super Bowl champion who also played in two of those third-place games.

Legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi hated the Playoff Bowl, once calling it “a hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players.”

The Playoff Bowl had no real hope for staying power if a man like Lombardi, who put winning over everything, didn’t put full commitment toward it.

“At the time, [Lombardi] probably cared [about winning the Playoff Bowl]. I’m sure he cared — but not very much,” Dowler, 87, recalled.