So, uh ... Karl?

An interesting All-Star reserve choice.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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The All-Star Reserves

The Guardian of Turkeys; Charles Angrand; 1881

The NBA announced All-Star reserves on Thursday night. Thirteen of the 14 that I predicted would make it in fact made it. The one exception: Karl-Anthony Towns made it over Rudy Gobert. I find this quite surprising on a couple of levels. First, while Towns has been important to keeping Minnesota’s offense afloat, the Wolves are great because of defense and that centers around Gobert. Second, while players and fans have issues with Gobert for various reasons, coaches have always appeared to love him. Frankly, given the surprising support for Towns I’m surprised “elect a second Wolf” votes didn’t dilute both cases enough to put someone else in there. Third, Anthony Edwards himself was saying after Wednesday’s game that he didn’t care if he made it but hoped Rudy would.

The NBA has not released reserve vote totals yet, but this is likely what happened with the Kings’ candidates as well. The Kings are now the only top-6 seed in either conference with no All-Stars. I think that factoid is not particularly relevant because the Kings are currently just one game ahead of the Pelicans, who had no one really in the All-Star conversation. The factoid is relevant in that Domantas Sabonis definitely should have been an All-Star over Towns if not Devin Booker or Paul George.