The Chaos of NBA All Star Voting (#NBAVote)
Kobe Bryant: 5 NBA championships, 1 MVP award, 18 All Star selections
Tim Duncan: 5 NBA championships, 2 MPV awards, 15 All Star selections
Magic Johnson: 5 NBA championships, 3 MVP awards, 12 All Star selections
Shaquille O’Neal: 4 NBA championships, 1 MVP award, 15 All Star selections
Michael Jordan: 6 NBA championships, 5 MVP awards, 14 All Star selections
You know, it’s funny how we use All Star selections as one of the ways we judge a player’s legacy when the All Star process itself is such a mess. All it takes is a glance at Kobe Bryant’s illustrious record to see the flaw in the logic – he got picked with a busted knee and a weak Achilles that one time. Clearly he wasn’t one of the best performing players that year, the bugger wasn’t hardly even playing and when he was his 13.8 points per game (he only played six to be fair) was way off any objective markers, but the fans got what the fans wanted and they voted him in by a huge distance (luckily the injury meant they got to call in a more deserving player).
Kobe Bryant, 2014: “With all due respect to the fans that voted me in, I certainly appreciate that, they know how much I appreciate that, but you got to do the right thing as well. My fans know you got to reward these young guys for the work that they've been putting in.”
For the record, Anthony Davis replaced him that season for his first ever ASG appearance.
This season they’ve acknowledged a little of the silliness and none too soon either, as the fans have pretty much figured out how to cheat the voting system now (Russian hackers…?). The fan voting ways have been in place since the 1974-75 season but this time around will only count for 50% of things, with the players and media also given 25% of a say each. There’s a panel of basketball media that’s been picked to fill out that side of things while all current NBA players (roughly 400 of them) get to fill out a ballot.
Except there is a small issue with that idea…
Turns out that players are just as fickle as fans and they only vote for their mates as well. Tony Allen here is a supremely talented defensive wing and although he’s never cracked the All Star team before, he does have three All-NBA Defensive nods. Maybe that means he’s looking at something different in how he rates players, finally giving the defensive heroes a shout out after being overlooked for… oh say roughly the entire history of the game. Or maybe he’s just a weirdo.
In addition to voting a Western team entirely comprised of himself and teammates (there’s no law against it), including not only the very deserving Marc Gasol but also former Perth Wildcat James Ennis, his Eastern team reads as such: Kemba Walker (you can make a case for him, sure), Mo Williams (well… All Stars don’t usually get traded mid-season and usually they play at least a couple of seconds), Luke Babbit (uh… huh?), Michael Beasley (are you flippin’ serious!?) and Andre Drummond (meh).
Watch the video, he pretty much just picks the first names he sees. Babbit, Drummond, Beasley… all names that show up bright and early in alphabetical orders. If 399 or so others all take their ballots as flippantly as Tony Allen then there are gonna be some hilarious numbers to look back on – although the League has already said they won’t release the player ballots individually. What a shame.
The thing is, they had to do something because leaving it all up to the fans was starting to get ridiculous as well… thanks to the Eastern European nation of Georgia. Last season Zaza Pachulia was around 14k votes short of starting ahead of Kawhi Leonard in the ASG. He still finished with more votes than Draymond Green (although Green got in on the bench as a coaches selection). Performance-wise there’s no justification at all but the voting system is the voting system and if there’s a hole then you’re well within your rights to take advantage of that. Gerogia’s not even a big country – with 4.5 million people it’s about the same size as New Zealand – but as Dirk Nowitzki said when asked about an inferior teammate having twice as many votes as him, “everyone with an Internet connection in Georgia” got voting. Encouraged by Wyclef Jean of all people who, having not yet departed until November, put up a song which helped kickstart the whole campaign and the novelty grew from there.
Zaza’s candidacy ran out of steam towards the end and Kawhi was able to edge in front of him, just like his season ran out of steam and he got trounced in the playoffs, the Mavs unable to trust him against the Spurs in round one and then trading him away for Andrew Bogut in the offseason. He’s understandably had a lesser role with the Warriors this season, playing only 17 minutes per game, but once the first round of ASG vote standings were announced guess who was sitting second amongst Western Conference frontcourters? Yup, Zaza Pachulia.
Ahead of Kawhi Leonard, ahead of Anthony Davis, ahead of Draymond Green, ahead of DeMarcus Cousins. Only his teammate Kevin Durant is ahead of him. You take the hype of Georgian voters, the hype of Warriors fans, the hype of a novelty/troll vote (remember that Harambe the Dead Gorillia was rumoured to have gotten something like 15000 write in votes for the Presidential election, although that’s almost certainly a massive exaggeration) and this is what you get.
DeMarcus Cousins: “Big Zaza, man … I gotta work on my game. I gotta get better. It’s like that sometimes. He’s a better player than me right now. I gotta accept it.”
Voting ends on January 16 in America, the starters are announced on the January 19. You can add three quarters of a day to that in NZ time so 6pm on Tuesday is your deadline to get voting. It’s easy to do as well, there are ballots on NBA.com and you can nominate 10 players every 24 hours, plus there’s the NBA app where you can do the same thing. You can use twitter or facebook with the hashtag #NBAVote and a player’s name on any tweet, status, reply, comment, retweet or post, though again there’s a limit of 10 unique players per 24 hours and you can only vote for the same bloke once in that timeframe. Plus there’s a google search voting car thingamajig, where you search NBA Vote and get it done on there.
The latest updated standings have come out and Zaza Pachulia has extended his lead over Kawhi Leonard from a shade under 100,000 votes to double that. As things stand, he’ll be starting the All Star game with Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, James Harden and Kawhi Leonard, depending on how the other 50% of the voting goes. Most players/media won’t fall for the Zaza thing, which is probably the whole point of it.
Over in the East, the fan votes have LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Love, Kyrie Irving and Dwyane Wade. Love’s lead over Joel Embiid is a small one and Embiid is running a very comprehensive personal campaign based around his desire to meet Rihanna. Also Dwyane Wade has a difficult task on his hands if he’s gonna withstand the charges of DeMar DeRozan and Isaiah Thomas amongst others once the player and media votes come in.
That’s the other thing about the fan voting, some teams court it more than others. Most of them are happy to tweet a few #NBAVote pics and they pretty much stick to their best couple of players. Other teams… well they go the extra mile…
The country of Georgia is the same size as New Zealand. While Zaza Pachulia is averaging 18 minutes per game with 5.5 points and 5.7 rebounds and shooting at 53.7%, Steven Adams is averaging 12.4 points, 7.7 rebounds and shooting at 60.1% in 30 minutes per game.
The moral of the story being if they can do it then so can we. Marc Gasol is tenth in the Western frontcourt standings with 172,146 votes so the most that Kiwi Steve could possibly have is one vote short of that. Unless the players and media rate him above the likes of Cousins, Towns, Aldridge, Gasol, Green and a few others then the chances of him making the team are slim – he won’t be getting in as a coaches select reserve either. But dammit we can try! Four more days, that’s four more chances to vote. Five options for voting so twenty possible votes you can still cast for Steven Adams. Comment and retweet. Google and NBA.com. The NBA app. If this article gets 1000 readers who follow through then that’s 20,000 votes right there.
Why the heck not, aye? Just don’t vote for Zaza.