NBA All-Star Game rosters: Team Stars, Team Stripes and Team World

Last season, the NBA debut a new format, eschewing the standard East vs. West and splitting things up for a tournament with four teams. It was a complete dud but they're trying it again this year with a new wrinkle — three teams, two representing the USA and one representing the World.

This created some chaos in the selection process, opening an additional, non-injury-replacement slot and with some injury replacements on different rosters than the players they're replacing. But in the end, we still have three interesting rosters loaded with talent and the league is hoping that US vs. the World will add enough stakes to turn exhibition basketball into something competitive enough to be watchable.

2026 NBA All-Star Game format and team rosters

As mentioned above, this year's 24 All-Stars were divided into three teams of eight players — two with players from the US (called Stars and Stripes) and one with players from other countries, called Team World. The selection process for that pool of 24 remained the same, with a mix of fan, media and player votes choosing the starters. The reserves were selected by the coaches in both conference.

However, because that initial pool of 24 ended with 15 US players and 9 world players, Adam Silver then chose Brandon Ingram as an additional All-Star to make sure the rosters were balanced as necessary. Because the World roster had an extra player, injury replacements were wonky. De'Aaron Fox was selected as an injury replacement for Team World's Giannis Antetokounmpo but will play for Team Stripes because Steph Curry on that roster is also injured. Alperen Şengün was chosen as an injury replacement for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on Team World.

On Sunday, the mini-tournament will being with Team World playing Team USA: Stars. The winner of that game will play Team USA: Stripes. Finally the loser of the first game will play Team USA: Stripes. From those three games, two teams will advance, identified first by record with total point differential as the tie-breaker. (Mathematically, the two possible scenarios are one team finishes 2-0, one finishes 1-1, one finishes 0-2, or all three teams finish 1-1 and point differential is used to identify who advances.)

The two teams that advance will then play in the Final. All games will be full-court but only 12 minutes long. If a game is tied at the end of 12 minutes, they play first-to-5 with no game clock.

Below are the rosters for each team in the 2026 All-Star Game, along with a brief description of each roster:

Team World

Team World will be without two starters — Antetokounmpo and Gilgeous-Alexander — but only gets Şengün as a replacement because they already had an extra body from the initial selection process. All that sets them with an incredible amount of size. There are four centers on the roster and they'll likely get plenty of opportunities to team up with Siakam and Avdija splitting time at the 3 and Dončić, Murray and Powell sharing the backcourt.

It feels weird to tag any of these teams as heavy favorites but the talent here is pretty remarkable. Players on this roster have won six of the last seven MVPs and if it goes to someone else this year (like Cade Cunningham), it will almost certainly be because Jokić, Dončić, Gilgeous-Alexander and Wembanyama don't play enough games to qualify.

Team USA: Stars

There is talent up and down this roster but it will be interesting to see how teammates Cunningham and Duren assert themselves. They've become one of the NBA's premier pick-and-roll combinations and could provide and offensive engine for complementary shooters and creators like Booker, Edward and Maxey to work around.

Duren and Holmgren will have their work cut out for them trying to deal with the size of Team World, but they can win with offensive execution, aggressive defense at the point of attack and the individual scoring exploits of their guards down the stretch.

Team USA: Stripes

This team has star power and name recognition with Kawhi, LeBron and Kevin Durant, but in terms of fit they may be the weakest of the three rosters. There are a lot of ball dominant wings and guards here and — with Curry sitting out with injury — no one who is really comfortable working off the ball as a floor-spacing threat. They don't have any centers on the roster and their quarter of forwards are all 3/4 hybrids rather than prototypical 4s.

They can win, but if they do it's going to be by exploiting individual mismatches, leaning into their small lineups with a lot of isolations and counting on their abilityto make tough shots.

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