Los Angeles Clippers rookie Brice Johnson, who has yet to play a minute of NBA action, received two All-Star votes from fellow players.
That, in a nutshell, summarizes how seriously the league’s hoopsters assumed the responsibility of casting All-Star ballots.
And Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr is disappointed in them, per the Bay Area News Group’s Anthony Slater:
Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who cast his ballot for reserves on Sunday and is likely to coach the All-Star game, criticized the players for it on Monday.
“I am very disappointed in the players,” Kerr said. “They asked for the vote and a lot of them just made a mockery of it…I saw the list. I saw all the guys who got votes. Were you allowed to vote for yourself? I don’t know. Were guys voting for themselves? There were 50 guys on there that had no business getting votes. But a lot of guys wrote in their buddies for the presidential campaign. So maybe that was their own way of making a statement. But I think if you give the players a vote, they should take it serious.”
Not every player turned the process into a farce. But, per Slater, more than 100 names didn’t even participate, and the outliers were hardly few and far between. With players clamoring for say in the All-Star teams, and with some of them disparaging the fan vote in years past, you’d think there would be a more serious turnout and outcome.
If anything, though, the players proved to be more similar to the fans than anything. Many either voted for their teammates, themselves or made a complete mockery of the new procedure.
Nothing has changed in that sense. The All-Star game is still for fun more than anything, and as such, it often lacks meaning. Though players deserve credit for earning the mid-February nods, we need to stop weighting selections so heavily into legacy conversations.
This way, it doesn’t matter how seriously or not the players and fans take the voting process.
