A Fan’s Guide To Voting For The 2016 NBA All-Star Game
With voting for the 2016 NBA All-Star Game officially opened up, here’s the ultimate fan guide to who deserves your digital ballot.
Full disclosure: I care more about the NBA All-Star Game more than most casual sports fans do.
Why? It’s the perfect medium between the NFL’s Pro Bowl (which, let’s be honest, everyone stopped giving a shit about once they turned nine years old) and the MLB’s All-Star Game (why in God’s green earth would a spectacle meant for the fans determine home field advantage for the World Series?).
The NBA All-Star Game is equal parts spectacle, skill, talent and, almost as important, provides virtually zero risk of injury to the game’s best players.
But here’s the thing: the voting process for the NBA All-Star Game is a complete and total sham. That seems contradictory after I just finished praising it for being a crowd-pleasing good time, but every year, people get awfully up in arms about who gets voted in — by the fans or the coaches — and who gets left out in the cold.
Some people have given up on the voting, or even the All-Star Game in general. It’s become the NBA’s American Idol, only people actually care about the results of this popularity contest. Even if you say you don’t, consider an important fact: When we sum up a player’s career and start listing the awards and accomplishments on their resume, All-Star appearances come up before All-NBA selections.
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Why? God only knows. The All-NBA selections are far more prestigious and require a great deal of meticulous thought, as opposed to an exhibition game with zero defense that approximately zero coaches in the league actually care about. Nevertheless, when people look back on an NBA season to remember which players had remarkable years, nine times out of 10 they’ll check the All-Star roster before the All-NBA listings.
For an NBA savant, there’s something inherently disturbing about that fact, especially when the All-Star roster is largely determined by the average fan. There’s a reason they’re the “average fan,” after all. Don’t you want to be more than average? Of course you do.
Bearing that in mind, here is the ultimate fan guide to voting for the 2016 NBA All-Star Game. Each conference is allowed five starters voted in by the fans (two guards and three frontcourt players) and seven reserves (two guards, three frontcourt players and two wildcards). Here’s a look at which 12 players are either the most deserving, or could be the most deserving of your votes as we inch closer to February.
Next: Western No-Brainers