Not All-Stars, but Mostly-Stars
What to make of NBA All-Star Voting
In the last week, the NBA announced the reserves for the NBA All-Star game. In recent history, the voting has shifted where fans have a 50% say in the starters (with 25% going to media and 25% to players), and no say in the reserves. Then, the 30 NBA Head Coaches select the 14 reserves. We still select 12 Eastern All-Stars and 12 Western All-Stars in total, but before the game the two highest vote-getters draft teams and play intermingled.
Now, this is different than the old pure fan vote, or the old pure media vote, but it still carries weight. Contract kickers include things like making the All-Star game, winning a starting spot, etc. Guys in the NBA literally get paid more to be invited to the game, and messing with this formula messes with their money. The stakes of this are well documented, I even wrote about it a year ago when Andrew Wiggins was selected. Fans have a big say on how players get in, and that’s been tainted by the internet, KPop, Twitterbots, and more.
This year? The victim is James Harden. While Harden has played just 34 of 60 games on the season, he’s currently healthy and averaging 21.4 points, 11.0 assists, and has a True Shooting Percentage of 61.9% (TS% takes into account the difficulty of shot based on distance, shouts to math). Jalen Rose decided we were corny if we said some guy needed to be put into the All-Star game without taking anyone out… but I’d (confidently) argue there are more Eastern Conference backcourt players Harden should be ahead of than guys he shouldn’t. Tyrese Haliburton, Jrue Holiday, DeMar DeRozan… put their pictures on the wall and throw a dart, take your pick. Harden is having a better year, on the team with the fourth best record in the NBA, than most any guard available.
Now, there are plenty of thinkpieces going into why that’s problematic. Further, there are a ton going into why the NBA media coaches may dislike Harden. A 21 ppg, 11 apg, 61 TS% season has happened just three prior times. Two of those three times were Ervin Magic Johnson, and he won MVP both years. More recently, it was done by 2017 MVP runner-up… James Harden. Without diving into the minutiae, that’s an interesting path plenty of Houston and Philadelphia-based outlets are diving into.
But I want to explore what could be done to fix this… because that bias feels real, and it is messing with a guy like Harden’s money. But would any option be less biased?
For example, in a pure fan vote, we end up with the Zaza Pachulia conundrum in 2016 and 2017. In 2017, with the entire nation of Georgia behind him, Pachulia was nearly voted into the All-Star game even though he was averaging less than 19 minutes a game, and just 6.1 points and 5.9 rebounds. Golden State was one of the all-time great teams, and Pachulia was a starter… but the team was unlocked in the minutes he was on the bench. The “Death Lineup” that ran through the NBA was predicated on player smaller, more versatile players in place of Pachulia. But after receiving the fourth most votes of a front-court player in 2016 (over 768,000), Pachulia earned 1,528,941 votes in 2017, the fifth highest of any Western Conference player.
Flatly, Pachulia was not an All-Star. He was, however, nearly voted in because his homeland and hometown fans pushed for him over the likes of Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard, perennial Defensive Player of the Year candidate (when healthy, I know) Anthony Davis, or even his teammate and Defensive Player of the Year Draymond Green. It feels fairly obvious, but if the NBA All-Star Game is truly going to be a pick up game with the 24 best players in the world, we can’t trust fans to pick who those rosters are.
Without diving too deeply into Harden specifically, I think it’s also fair to say that media members can have their own biases. Larger markets have larger media outlets, more coverage, and thus more media voters. But more specifically, we hear their biases play out. Kendrick Perkins supports LeBron James and Kevin Durant over everyone because he played with James and Durant. On the inverse, Paul Pierce played against James and regularly underscores his historic achievements.
It’s not just former players, either. Coastal biases tend to follow the big teams in big markets at the expense of the smaller ones. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic have combined to win the last four MVP awards (and may finish one-two this season), but the media does a much better job of covering the latest fight in the locker room amongst a team of dudes in thirteenth place. This is a problem, in a macro sense. In a micro sense, this impacts the All-Star voting because there are less and less media voters watching all 62,976 minutes (plus overtime) of basketball in a regular season. (That’s nearly 44 straight days of nonstop NBA basketball, plus overtime, to be fair.) (If you would like to pay me to watch that much basketball and then talk about it, please leave your contact information in the comments.)
Plus, sometimes the athletes being covered is the problem. Whatever my personal problems with what K*rie said aside, I’m fairly quick to point out he is an All-Star caliber basketball player… but not everyone would jump there. (To *rving’s credit, he is and continues to be an incredibly charitable person. I just feel this one wrong requires a lot of rights to undo, and that he was tied up in it fairly intentionally. And, he seems to keep diving deeper into some of these types of problems. And I think that’s, simply put, bad.)
Then, in the case of this year, the coaches display their own bias. I am sure James Harden is frustrating to play and coach against. I am sure the way he manipulates calls and contact, has stretches of low effort on defense and watching him dribble the ball for 18 of 24 seconds on the shot clock can be wearing. And I’m sure that coaches feel like, on paper, there are simple ways to shut down James Harden offensively and exploit his defense. But on the hardwood, Harden’s teams tend to win when he and his teammates are healthy.
Further, whatever the criticism, he’s playing like a different All-Star this year. Do you think he shot the ball too much before? He’s shooting just 14 shots a game now. Do you hink he needs to pass more? He’s leading the league in assists per game. And while it’s because he funnels guys to MVP candidate Joel Embiid, he’s not giving up a ton of points defensively, either. Do you need a “winner guy?” The Sixers are 24-6 with him on the floor this year, they’re 10-12 with him off it.
It’s not that James Harden is his 2018 MVP self. And it’s not that he’s even clearly one of the 10 best players in the NBA anymore, because he may not be. But he’s very clearly one of the best 20, let alone best 24. And to be clear, James Harden is this guy this year. There is a guy in this spot each year, watching the DeRozan’s or Haliburton’s picked ahead of them because they’re the new thing on the block, or have some tie to a vintage aesthetic, or both. This year it doesn’t feel like the 24th guy vs. the 25th guy, and coaches’ personal preferences shift things. It feels more like 15th guy vs the 25th, but that may not be the biggest issue, either.
When given 24 players to pick from, it can be hard to rid the process of bias entirely. Media will pick their favorites, but so will other players, coaches, and fans alike. So maybe we don’t need to put such a weight on the selection, after all? When we put athletes in the Basketball Hall of Fame, one of the handful of things that gets rattled off is “X-time All-Star,” but why? All-Stars are selected, by fans, coaches, media, etc., but weighed heavier than most other statistics or awards, and that in and of itself may be the problem.
One inevitable argument is that the All-Star Game is meant to entertain the fans. If they don’t want the best 24 players in the world on the floor, and they want to see Pachulia and Boban go after it, let them!
That’s absolutely the way to go. Let the fans pick the whole thing, if it’s really about them. But, if it’s about the fans… it can’t also be an escalator in contracts, it can’t also be at the top of a Hall of Fame resume, and it can’t also be considered the world’s best pick up game anymore. If we’re going to do any of that, we either need to re-evaluate picking All-Stars, or we need to apply nuance and context to how we use All-Star nods.
I take it that’s much, much harder… So Boban, you’re next up.