NBA fans show sentimentality in All-Star picks
Let’s get a few things straight about the NBA All-Star Game starting selection reveal. It didn’t give us definite proof on who the best 10 players in the NBA are. It didn’t even answer the question of what the correct definition of an All-Star is.
But it again provided an intriguing social experiment into what matters in the minds of the people the NBA cares most about pleasing ... its fans.
The NBA fan base is unpredictable, caring little for how it’s told it should feel by the media, statisticians or precedent.
With the fan vote counting for 50 percent, typically we see fans get what they want, most notably exemplified by Paul George getting the nod over Anthony Davis in a Western Conference tiebreaker.
So what do fans in 2019 care about most?
For a start, let’s get past this notion of NBA fans being babyfaced millennials temporarily fixated on the latest fad before swiping right onto the next, next, next big thing. This season’s announcement proved wholeheartedly that NBA fans are a bunch of sentimentalists.
How else do you explain Dwyane Wade getting bumped to second place in the fan ballot for the Eastern Conference’s backcourt? Wade has had a pretty good season featuring 13.8 points per game and a sweet little goodbye moment with his old pal LeBron James in Los Angeles in December.
But second place? There was likely a bit of heartstrings tugging going on with Wade being positioned as high as sixth on the media and player voting blocs, each worth 25 percent of the vote. But the online viewers took it a step further, and it took Wade to the cusp of a starting spot, landing him just behind Kemba Walker.
Derrick Rose also got a healthy jolt from the public, who positioned him second among guards in the West, ahead of human stat line James Harden. Rose just missed out on a start, with the players placing him fourth and the media sixth.
The fans also love a good story. George’s clinching of a starting place is deserved on account of his exceptional season, yet he might have found himself on the outside looking in if there hadn’t been a cheery plotline to go along with it.
George did not place in the top three in any of the three sections yet sneaked above Davis in a Western Conference frontcourt tiebreaker, with the fan vote the deciding factor.
There is a feel-good quality about George’s campaign, the fact that he liked it in Oklahoma City so much that he didn’t even talk to the Lakers and chose to stick in a smaller market. Compared to Davis, who most expect to cut and run from New Orleans before too long, George had the neater narrative and the fans acted accordingly. However, it would have taken just one extra player vote for Nikola Jokic to have pushed George behind Davis and to the reserves list.
Fans want to see their favorites, but they don’t need to see them all the time. James had missed 16 games to injury through this past weekend, but he was the top vote-getter. Steph Curry, the highest-polling guard in the West, and Kawhi Leonard, a frontcourt starter in the East, played only four more than James (34 games) to date.
Giannis Antetokounmpo enjoys huge popularity in the United States, but his massive European following didn’t hurt when it came to pushing him into the second overall voting spot for a second year in a row.
Yet the real Euro buzz was all about Luka Doncic, whose brilliant rookie season got him more than 4.2 million fan votes and solidified his status as one of the most exciting first-year players in recent memory. If the players had been a little more generous — they had Doncic behind both LaMarcus Aldridge and Steven Adams — the young Slovenian would have gotten a start in Charlotte on Feb. 17.
Finally, while the NBA media feed their readers and listeners a constant diet of numbers-laden commentary, there is some proof that the fans care more about optics than decimal points.
Harden, a Wilt Chamberlainesque vacuum where points come to be devoured, notched just third place among Western Conference guards as per the fans, relying on a first-place media ranking and second spot among his colleagues to get his starting position. Sixty-one points be damned.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The fans do as the fans want, and in the NBA, for the most part, they get what they want.