Where is Khris Middleton of the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA All-Star voting?

The Milwaukee Bucks are the league’s best team by record and performance. Why then is Khris Middleton nowhere to be found in the NBA All-Star voting?

The Milwaukee Bucks are the league’s best team. At the time of this writing, they have the league’s best record at 33-6, with a top-three offense and a top-three defense. Their net rating of plus-11.8 is 3.9 points better than the second-place Los Angeles Lakers. In fact the Lakers are closer to eighth than to the Bucks in first.

Last season they were in a similar place at this point in the season, a league-leading 29-11. Khris Middleton was a successful Robin to Giannis Antetokounmpo‘s Batman, ultimately averaging 18.3 points per game on solid percentages.

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He joined with Eric Bledsoe, Malcolm Brogdon, Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez to form a formidable two-way lineup. He was rewarded with the first All-Star nod of his career, a combination of his individual play and his team’s success.

This year around things are even rosier; the Bucks are 4.5 games better, his scoring is up slightly, and his shooting percentages are up as well. Nothing about his play or the Bucks’ play has dropped from a season ago, and in most areas they have improved. Why, therefore, is he not on the All-Star voting radar?

The first returns for the NBA All-Star fan voting were released at the start of 2020, and not only was Middleton not in line to be voted in as an All-Star starter in the Eastern Conference, he wasn’t even on the page.

The first returns are historically unreliable. Surely the omission would be corrected by the second ballot, when the likes of Derrick Rose and Tacko Fall would drop off in favor of more deserving candidates such as Middleton.

Yet again one of the league’s better wing players, a former All-Star on the league’s best team, was left out. When fans decided who they thought should make the team, they concluded at least 300,000 times that Tacko Fall, who has appeared in jury four career games and totaled 22 minutes, was more deserving of a vote than Middleton.

These votes shouldn’t be taken too seriously — they don’t decide who makes the All-Star team by themselves. The All-Star Game starters will be determined by a combination of fan, media and current NBA players. The reserves will be selected by the league’s coaches. Middleton has a strong possibility of gaining a spot on the bench despite his lack of fan support.

But that lack has to hurt, as Middleton is surely among the ten best forwards in the Eastern Conference. The Boston Celtics have five players appear on this ballot, and Philadelphia, Miami, Toronto and Detroit(!) all have two or three entries. The Bucks have just one.

Is this a reflection of the Bucks’ status as a small market team? Is it Middleton’s quiet nature off-the-court, choosing not to be a vocal part of the NBA culture? Do fans have something against him personally as a player?

Middleton doesn’t deserve to be an All-Star starter, and that is all the fan vote is helping to determine. Yet it reflects that the Bucks, for however well their depth works together, are viewed by the fans of the league as a one-star team. For a player proving himself to be worthy of the mantle placed on him, that is downright insulting to Khris Middleton.