At the heart of the N.B.A.’s quandary is the issue of size. Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, the most seriously competitive of such events, is also an automatic sellout, but fans have a chance to purchase tickets online because the games are held in far bigger stadiums. Unlike the N.B.A., Major League Baseball sees fit to claim only about a third of the All-Star tickets in a given stadium for its own use.

Then there is the N.F.L., which presides over the most popular sport in the United States. It also has the biggest stadiums, which means its corporate needs take up less overall space than other sports; in the recent Super Bowl in Arizona, for example, the N.F.L. claimed just 25.2 percent of the tickets. (The N.F.L.’s all-star game, the Pro Bowl, has long been viewed as an afterthought, although the game did sell out this season.)

As for the N.H.L., the league most directly comparable to the N.B.A. because they share some of the same arenas and the same basic calendar, its All-Star Game requires that about 40 percent of the seats be delegated for league purposes, substantially less than the N.B.A.’s needs. Then again, the N.H.L. does not have as broad an appeal as the N.B.A.

And it is not only in recent years that the N.B.A. has created a featured event that is so hard to get into. In 2002, a month before Philadelphia was the home city for the N.B.A. All-Star Game, Ed Snider, the 76ers’ chairman at the time, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he never again wanted to be the host because of the issues, and local resentment, created by the fact that there were so few tickets for his own fans. He said the league had given the 76ers 3,000 tickets to sell to a season-ticket base that numbered 15,000. Demand, he said, was overwhelming supply.

“People think it’s our game, but it’s the league’s game,” Snider, who sold the team in 2011, told The Inquirer. Through a spokesman, Snider declined to be interviewed for this article.

Joe Favorito, a former strategic communications adviser for the Knicks and the 76ers, a sports media consultant and a professor at Columbia, said the N.B.A.’s global draw, with television partners around the world, made an event like the All-Star Game something all sorts of corporate clients wanted to attend.