They say numbers never lie, but sometimes they couldn’t be further from the truth.
Before his season ended due to a torn rotator cuff, Kobe Bean Bryant’s respective points, rebounds and assists per game were 22.3, 5.7 and 5.6.
“Wow Shad, those are incredible numbers, especially for a 36-year old superstar coming off a couple major injuries, that guy definitely deserves to be an all-star starter!”
No, confused random person, no he does not. Let me throw another number out there: 37.3 percent. That’s Kobe’s shooting percentage on 20.4 field goal attempts per game.
While that success rate would definitely garner MVP attention in the MLB, this is the NBA, and 37.3 percent is in what I like to call “Rubio range,” in reference to Ricky Rubio, who for a large chunk of last season challenged the worst shooting percentage in NBA history.
“So a player like Kobe who is approaching “Rubio range” has no shot at making the all-star team, much less starting it, right? World hunger no longer exists as well, right?” Sadly, my dear reader, both of those statements are incorrect. While I have no quick fixes to the latter issue, I do have an easy solution to fixing the first one: Eliminate the fan vote.
When a top-three MVP candidate in James Harden gets left off the NBA all-star starting five in favor of a player like Bryant, a pretty obvious problem exists. Harden is having the best season of his career, leading the league in scoring at 27.6 points per game, while adding in 5.6 rebounds and 6.8 assists per contest. He also is nowhere near “Rubio range,” shooting a crisp 45.5 percent from the field.
Harden has also carried the Rockets to a fourth-place ranking in the Western conference, despite Houston’s second best player, Dwight Howard, missing a substantial chunk of games.
While Harden has always been heavily criticized for his defense, the dude has the fifth-highest defensive win shares total of the season at 2.6. Harden certainly is not the fifth-best defender in the NBA or anywhere close to that, but he definitely has improved from being a league-wide laughingstock on that end.
While Harden will most likely replace Bryant as the Western Conference’s starting shooting guard, the mere fact that it took a torn rotator cuff for that to happen indicates that a change to the process needs to be made.
All-star voting across all sports has almost exclusively been a popularity contest, and the NBA is no different. However, unlike the NFL, being an NBA all-star actually matters. Players love competing in it, and unlike the NFL, most of the athletes selected actually do participate.
It no longer makes sense to let the selection of an important event like this be up to popularity, where for the first time in his career James Harden had more fan votes than his former Houston teammate Jeremy Lin.
While Bryant might be the most egregious selection this year, the fact that Lin had the ninth-most fan votes out of any Western Conference backcourt player, and over double the amount Mike Conley Jr. collected is just mind-boggling.
We Americans love to vote, it’s what we fought for way back in 1776, but Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban points out that we don’t really care about voting for the NBA all-star game. It’s time to do away with an already bad system.
Cuban proposes that coaches and GMs should choose the whole roster, and while I think that’s a great start, the real voting committee should include knowledgeable sports writers like Zach Lowe and myself (I’m only kidding about one of those literary geniuses).
This would expand the voting base and help prevent mistakes that even prime NBA talent evaluators like coaches and GMs can make (cough *Joe Johnson* cough).
While fan voting makes a few viewers of the NBA feel more included, if the system’s broke, it’s time to fix it, and with Kobe Bryant earning another all-star starting nod, the system is in dire need of repair.
Are all-star selections that celebrate great careers like Kobe’s a mistake? Or should season stats alone determine who makes the squad? What would be the best way to fix the voting system? Email machhi@wisc.edu to share your ideas.
