The All-Star voting disconnects: Embiid's lament, Situation Kyrie and the Brow is beaten
Digging deep into the votes to learn how what people think about certain players.
Good morning. Let’s basketball.
Portrait of Eleanor of Austria; Joos van Cleve; 1530
The NBA All-Star starters were announced on Thursday. LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo will be the captains as the top fan vote-getters. The other starters, barring injury restrictions, will be Nikola Jokic, Zion Williamson, Luka Doncic, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Jayson Tatum, Donovan Mitchell and Kyrie Irving. Coaches will now select the seven reserves for each team. Those players will be announced next Thursday. Then Adam Silver will select any injury reserves if All-Stars are ruled out (Zion and Durant seem like candidates there, and Luka Doncic rolled his ankle Thursday night).
Who gets the starting nod in the fringe cases is only mildly entertaining. What’s really enlightening about the current All-Star voting process is that we see for which players fans, the media and players really diverge in their opinions. Why? The NBA releases all of the vote totals. So let’s dig into the crunchy underbelly of All-Star voting.
Embiid’s Lament
Joel Embiid is the odd big man out in the East frontcourt. I predicted that he’d finish higher than Tatum in the player vote based on past results that showed some skepticism from fellow players toward Tatum. This turned out to be correct: Embiid finished third in player voting, Tatum finished fourth.
The problem for Embiid is that because fan vote ranking (where it became he was headed for a 4th-place finish) counts twice as much as player or media voting, he needed to finish above third in either category to get into a starting role. Because he finished behind Giannis and Durant in the player vote, that hurt his chances. And then he almost finished fourth in media voting where he needed to finish first or second to have a shot. He finished with one media vote more than Durant, and a dozen fewer than Tatum (who won the media vote) or Giannis.
If Embiid needs a chip on his shoulder — and I suspect he does not — then finishing fourth in All-Star voting in the East despite being the top scorer in the NBA for the No. 2 seed might do it.
Is it possible to finish fourth in the fan vote for the frontcourt and still became a starter? Let’s go to the West, where this actually happened.
Brow beaten
Anthony Davis held on to the fan vote lead over Zion for No. 3 in the West frontcourt … but he still missed out on a starting nod. Why? Because both players and the media basically abandoned AD as a candidate.
This is one of the more wild All-Star voting results I’ve seen, excusing the Andrew Wiggins thing last year. Davis finished sixth in the media vote behind Jokic, LeBron, Domantas Sabonis (who made 46% of the media ballots), Zion and Lauri Markkanen. But then Davis finished even lower on the player ballot: lower than all of the aforementioned names plus Paul George. Yes, AD finished seventh in player voting. He was only three votes (30 to 27) ahead of Jerami Grant! Put another way: almost as players voted for Jerami Grant to be an All-Star starter as voted for Anthony Davis. Getting 30 player votes is almost in the “novelty vote” range.
Obviously, you can’t finish seventh in any category and have a shot at starting, unless the race is really, really weird.
Once you got past AD, it wasn’t that weird. Zion finished third in player voting (not by much over Markkanen, who performed better among players than the media) and fourth in media voting. That allowed Zion to secure the third starting spot. Markkanen and Sabonis were essentially not in play due to finishing seventh and ninth in fan voting, respectively.
Situation Kyrie
I was curious where Kyrie would end up in the media vote. I knew he would ace the player vote — fellow players love Kyrie, unless they have recently played with him — and he did. Winning the fan vote (as Kyrie did, albeit quite narrowly over Mitchell) and either one of the other two categories almost assures you a starting spot. You’d have to finish extremely low in the third category to miss out.
Kyrie finished low, but not too low. He was fourth in the media vote behind Mitchell, Jaylen Brown and Tyrese Haliburton. That was enough to cinch it up. I was curious how the off-court tumult — in which Kyrie promoted anti-Semetic material and for a time refused to recant it — would impact the media vote. Of course, the off-court tumult impacted on-court results as Kyrie was suspended for a time. Kyrie hadn’t had a particularly productive season until the last couple of weeks. I’m honestly surprised Kyrie finished with many more media votes than James Harden, given everything. I’m sure that, like me, the NBA is just relieved that Kyrie isn’t a captain.
Speaking of Harden, he didn’t get much respect in player voting either, finishing fifth. Am I ahead of the curve in the Harden Brand Rehabilitation Project, or is that project doomed to fail?
Haliburton’s status is worth watching for the future. There’s a little Sabonis going on here: Hali was third in media vote, but sixth in player vote (behind the starters, Brown, DeMar DeRozan and Harden) and eighth in fan vote (small market penalty).
Klaytheism Becomes Klaynosticism
Are NBA players out on Klay Thompson? The dude only received four total player votes in the West backcourt. That’s fewer than teammates Jordan Poole and Donte DiVincenzo. It’s fewer than Kevin Huerter, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Kevin Porter Jr. Other West guards with four player votes: Jalen Green, Ochai Agbaji and Nickeil Alexander-Walker. Klay finished 25th in the player vote!
Usually accomplished veterans get a bump from fellow players (see DeRozan). Maybe the ballot was offered in alphabetical order and no one got down to the Ts before selecting their choices. That might help explain Agbaji and Alexander-Walker, too.
Unanimity
Interestingly, only one player was a unanimous pick in the media vote: Nikola Jokic. That made me think of how hilarious it’d be if Jokic were a captain one of these years. Frankly, while I know LeBron loves being a captain — he clearly relishes it! — I hope he picks Jokic No. 1 and then asks him to help make the picks at All-Star in a few weeks. The people want more Jokic!
Luka came one vote short of unanimity. LeBron and Mitchell were both four votes short. No one else was particularly close.
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