It may be time to re-think All-Star voting

It's reasonable to think Chet Holmgren will be an NBA All-Star one day. He was a highly recruited high school player whose one year at Gonzaga was stellar enough for Oklahoma City to make him the No. 2 pick in last year's draft. He's an obvious talent, an enormous talent.

And it's terrible that Holmgren got hurt last summer and will miss the entirety of this season.

But evidently, his rehab has been going extremely well — since four NBA players say he should start next month's All-Star Game.

That's right. When NBA players were asked in recent weeks who should start their All-Star Game in Salt Lake City on Feb. 19, four of them said that Holmgren should, even though he has yet to make his NBA debut.

So, congratulations to everyone involved. It's a new record: 330 different NBA players got a vote — either from themselves or their peers — saying they should be an All-Star starter. That's 20 more than the number of players who got votes in 2021.

Keep in mind only 10 people will start the AllStar Game. There might be, at the most, 20 legitimate candidates for those starting nods. OK, let's say it's 30 players, even. That's 300 less than the number of people who received votes.

That means a ton of votes were wasted, unserious, a joke.

This all started seven years ago, after almost 800,000 people stuffed the ballot boxes and nearly made Zaza Pachulia an AllStar starter. So the NBA changed the rules, going to a weighted formula — 50% is determined by fan votes, 25% by media votes, 25% by player votes.

The fans pretty much got who they wanted, as should always be the case. LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant,

Stephen Curry, Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic and Jayson Tatum were the top seven fan vote-getters; they all were announced as starters when the list was revealed Thursday night. So did No. 9 Kyrie Irving, No. 10 Donovan Mitchell and No. 12 Zion Williamson.

No. 7 Joel Embiid didn't make the cut, nor did No. 11 Anthony Davis.