For the sixth straight year, the NBA asked me if I wanted to be one of the media members who votes on which players should start in the NBA All-Star Game. I said yes; here’s how I used my ballot.
(Quick refresher: You vote for three frontcourt players and two guards in each conference. Fan voting makes up 50% of the final result, with player and media ballots accounting for 25% each.)
All stats and records entering Tuesday’s games.
West All-Star starters
FC Nikola Jokić, Nuggets
FC Anthony Davis, Lakers
FC Victor Wembanyama, Spurs
G Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Thunder
G Stephen Curry, Warriors
The shoo-ins: As was the case last season, my ballot began with Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić, at this point seemingly in line to be the top two finishers in MVP voting for a second consecutive season. If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to sell you on either of them too hard at this point, so I’ll try to keep this brief:
Gilgeous-Alexander is tied for the league lead in scoring, averaging 31.5 points per game on pristine 53/35/90 shooting splits, as the driving (and I mean that literally) force behind a Thunder team that leads the West, is on pace for 68 wins, and outscores opponents by a mammoth 18.9 points per 100 possessions when he’s on the floor — the largest margin of any player in the NBA, according to Basketball Reference.
SGA has made All-NBA First Team the last two seasons and finished second in MVP voting last season, and he’s been even better this year — nearly impossible to keep from getting to his spots and doing whatever damage he wants once he arrives. Oh, and he’s also second in steals and top-25 in deflections for what has a chance to go down as the stingiest defense since the ABA-NBA merger. Total no-brainer.
So, too, is this friggin’ guy:
Jokić is a literal handful of assists away from joining Oscar Robertson and his new running buddy Russell Westbrook as the only players in NBA history to average a 30-point triple-double. He remains the most efficient point producer on the planet: third in the NBA in scoring at a career-high 30.1 points per game on a .648 true shooting percentage, which factors in 2-point, 3-point and free-throw accuracy (a combination of scoring volume and efficiency that only a half-dozen other players in league history have matched); second in points created via assist; tied for fourth in points created via screen assist.
Every Jokić touch is an all-hands-on-deck nightmare for the defense: The Nuggets score an obscene 127.1 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with the Serbian giant on the court, a rate miles ahead of even the best offenses in league history. It sounds like hyperbole to say that the big fella’s playing even better now than he did during his three MVP seasons. The stats, eye test and bottom-line results for a Denver team that sits just two games back of second place almost solely because of him, however, suggest that it might not be — that the best in the world just keeps getting better.
A month ago, the third write-it-in-Sharpie name on my ballot would’ve been Luka Dončić, averaging just under 29-9-8 on above-league-average true shooting, and playing like a top-five MVP candidate for a Dallas team jousting with the Rockets and Grizzlies for the No. 2 spot out West. But with a left calf injury keeping the five-time All-Star out since Christmas, there’s now a gap of several hundred minutes, and double-digit games, between Dončić and the rest of the best of the Western guards — enough of a chasm for me to drop him from the starting five.
The search for a backcourt partner for SGA: A number of qualified candidates are in the midst of stellar seasons. Dončić’s partner, Kyrie Irving, has been characteristically excellent, averaging 24.2 points, 4.8 assists and 4.5 rebounds per game and shooting a career-best 43% from 3-point land. Anthony Edwards has admirably shouldered a downright Thibodeauian workload in Minnesota, averaging better than 26-5-4 to carry the scuffling post-KAT Timberwolves to a league-average offense that is, for now, keeping them afloat. Devin Booker’s having a down season by his standards — just 44.1% from the field and 34.5% from 3-point range, the fourth-worst effective field goal percentage of his career — but he’s still averaging 25.5 points and 6.6 assists per game for a Suns offense that has scored at a top-seven clip with him on the floor.
De’Aaron Fox sits 10th in scoring and 15th in assists for a Kings team that has surged since Mike Brown’s firing (with which, in case you were wondering, Fox has loudly insisted he had nothing to do). The Clippers — a team that many pundits (cough, cough) all but left for dead after Paul George’s exit and Kawhi Leonard’s latest monthslong absence — are fifth in the West, on pace for 47 wins, due in large part to James Harden continuing to rank among the NBA’s elite facilitators and Norman Powell, in his 10th season, blossoming into one of the most efficient high-volume scorers in the entire NBA.
In the end, though, I came back to Curry. Because while this has been Golden State’s worst non-injury-ravaged season since the lockout-shortened 2011-12 campaign, Steph himself remains awfully damn good.
As rough as the Warriors have been on the whole, they’ve actually outpaced opponents by 4.4 points per 100 possessions in Curry’s…
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