Officially Unofficial All-Star Starters Ballot
Who I'd vote to start the All-Star Game, if I had a ballot
In the space below, you will find my officially unofficial NBA All-Star starter selections. I don’t have an official ballot, but given the amount of time and energy I put into watching and analyzing this league every day and night, I wanted to get my picks on (virtual) paper before the actual starters are announced tomorrow on TNT.
That being said, here a few things to know before we get into the picks:
This “ballot” does not count. So if you want to get angry about it, save your energy! It doesn’t mean anything anyway and you can rest easy knowing that dummies like me will not affect whether or not your favorite player makes it.
However, if I didn’t vote for your favorite player, please know from the bottom of my heart that it’s not because I hate and/or didn’t watch your favorite team.1 It’s because I hate you, personally.
I do not give extra credit for team success and feel no need to have specific teams represented with a certain number of players because of where that team falls in the standings. The reward for being a really good team is the wins. Team record is a factor, but it is just a factor — not a determinative one.2
Without further ado…
We’re going to spend much more time talking about the West than we do the East. If these aren’t your five Eastern Conference starters, I’m looking at you at least a little suspiciously. There really wasn’t much to debate for me.
Brunson and Mitchell have been fairly obviously the two best guards in the East. If you want to make an argument for someone like Trae Young or LaMelo Ball, I will point you to their overall inefficiency and (especially in LaMelo’s case) inattention to defense. If you want to make an argument for Cade Cunningham, I will point you to his inefficiency relative to Brunson and Mitchell. If you want to make an argument for Darius Garland, I don’t think it’s a very good one considering Mitchell has been the better, more impactful player in Cleveland’s backcourt. I think Damian Lillard has a better case than all of those guys, but he falls short of Brunson and Mitchell due to their centrality to their teams’ successes and his defensive limitations.
There was even less to think about in the frontcourt. Each of those three players are going to be on MVP ballots, with Giannis and Tatum having a chance to crack the top three and, if something special happens over the course of the rest of the season, make a real run at one of the top two spots. Towns has been utterly dominant in the most efficient scoring season of his career, while also leading the NBA in both defensive and total rebound rate. The abominable rim protection numbers from early in the season have improved greatly, and he’s fully deserving of the final spot in the lineup.
There were only two guaranteed spots for me in the West: SGA and Jokic.
For the second guard slot, it came down to Edwards, Stephen Curry, Kyrie Irving, and De’Aaron Fox.3 I spent a while weighing various factors here. Steph and Kyrie, obviously, have been the most efficient shooters. Steph and Fox have borne the most playmaking responsibility. Edwards is rather easily the best defender, even if all of them contribute on that end in their own ways. Fox has been unbelievably effective from two-point range, but struggled from three. Edwards has dramatically ramped up his three-point volume and accuracy, but sacrificed some of his dominance at the rim to do it — not only is he getting there less often, he's not finishing quite as well when he does. Curry is carrying his lowest usage rate since 2015 and having his worst turnover season in several years, but he remains the player who drives defenses most haywire just by moving a step or two in any direction. Kyrie doesn’t carry as much responsibility as the others when Luka Doncic is on the floor with him, but Luka also hasn’t been on the floor all that often.
Then I looked at the minutes column. Edwards has played over 400 more minutes than Irving, and over 500 more than Curry. That is a significant gap. At this point of the season, he has essentially been on the floor 50% more often than those two players. Have either of them been 50% better when on the court than has Edwards? Have they come anywhere close to that? Maybe 25% better? I don't think so. When players have played about as well as each other and one has played far more often, I am going to lean in his direction. Fox got much closer to Edwards in terms of minutes (130 shy as of this writing), but the threat Edwards now poses from deep combined with the defensive acumen and versatility he brings to the table tipped the scales in his direction.4
For the two starting frontcourt spots alongside Jokic, I considered Durant, Wembanyama, and Anthony Davis. Even if I were the type of person to give extra credit for how good a player’s team is, well, none of those three guys’ teams is all that good. So, we’d be starting on a pretty level playing field anyway.
Davis leads this trio in minutes, but not by nearly as significant a margin as Edwards leads the primary competition at guard. After that, it comes down to how you weigh different aspects of basketball. Do you prefer the way Durant warps the court by his mere presence, and the versatility he brings on both ends? Do you prefer Davis' nightly defensive dominance, even if you have to live with some inconsistencies on the other end and the nights where he limps off the court and then isn't full strength when he returns? Do you think aliens should legally be allowed to play in the All-Star Game, even if they turn the ball over a lot and take some pretty bad shots?
I’m a sucker for KD’s game. It’s basically designed for me to like it.The guy is good-to-great-to-all-time-elite at essentially everything, with his only relative weakness being getting open away from the ball — and even that isn’t that much of a weakness anymore. I’ve said this before, but while there are players who had better careers than him for a variety of reasons, I’m pretty sure he’s one of the three best basketball players I’ve ever seen.5 He hasn’t slowed down too much these days, if at all. He’s in.
It then came down to parsing AD vs. Wemby. And this was hard as hell, folks. The thing is, the one thing the two of them are best at is defense and specifically paint-erasure, and Wemby is just SO MUCH better at it. Davis is amazing. In a universe where Wemby didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be fair to compare many other players to AD, defensively. But Wemby does exist. And he does that shit at a level I can barely even comprehend. When you throw in the fact that he has been just as efficient as a scorer and just as prolific as a distributor and just as good a per-minute rebounder… well, you get the idea.
Check back in next week for the reserve picks. I’ll be using these starters when making those picks, not the actual ones that are announced tomorrow, for the sake of consistency.
According to my game-watching spreadsheet, on which I assume I am fully up to date, I have watched 125 start-to-finish games this season. That’s two a night every Monday through Friday except for three days I missed when I had other obligations. And there have been plenty of others I’ve flipped through on weekends and haven’t tracked for the spreadsheet.
Here’s how I explained my thinking when doing revealing All-NBA picks last year: “Jayson Tatum does not get extra credit and bumped up to First Team because the rest of the Celtics were so amazing, and Anthony Davis similarly doesn’t get dinged for the rest of the non-LeBron Lakers not being very good at all. I’m also not dinging Tatum for having good teammates nor giving Davis credit for having worse ones. I’m just trying to narrow down on their individual performance level. When someone like Tatum (or Brown, Derrick White, Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, or Al Horford) scales back on individual production in pursuit of team success, that is naturally going to result in less individual recognition; notably, that was the entire point of them doing so.
In certain cases I may lean on team success — and specifically success with a player on the floor — as a tiebreaker; but if one player had a better season than another, I’m not going to elevate the latter player because his team happened to have a better record. We are looking for the best individual seasons this year within the bounds of the eligibility rules.”
I briefly considered James Harden, but one of the most efficient scorers of all time is sitting here with a career-low-tying 48.4 effective field goal percentage. There are reasons for that, obviously, and that number would be higher if Kawhi Leonard had been playing all season. But we’re not awarding based on hypotheticals here.
I’m not penalizing Fox for the Mike Brown drama, because this is an individual excellence award. I would factor it into my MVP calculation as I did for Giannis last year, but I don’t think Fox will garner much attention there.
I’m 37. I didn’t actually see all that much of Magic and Larry. Sorry.