NBA 2022 All-Star Voting: Who's Too High and Who's Too Low in 1st Returns,
It's officially debate season in the NBA. Who will get traded before the deadline? Who's leading the MVP race? Which team is the favorite to win the title? And, of particular importance right now, who should make the All-Star team?
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| NBA 2022 ALL STAR |
On Thursday, roughly a month-and-a-half prior to the 2022 All-Star break, The Athletic and Stadium's Shams Charania tweeted out the first batch of fan votes. And, as is annual tradition at this point, plenty of players looked a little out of place.
With the possible exception of DeMar DeRozan leading the way for Eastern Conference guards, the first couple of names in each section were probably fairly predictable. And even in DeMar's case, fringe MVP candidacy in Chicago was bound to generate plenty of votes.
But beyond the highest vote-getters, a number of names seem either too high or too low. So that's the very game we'll play with each. And for the purposes of this exercise, we'll endeavor to compare each player's rank on the list above to where they should within on a more objective process for selecting All-Stars (not where we think they should rank based on popularity or the number of votes we thought they'd receive).
To do this, we'll appeal to a number of catch-all metrics from around the internet that hope to capture all (or most of) a player's on-court contributions in a single statistic. I won't pretend that this is the only (or even the best) method for narrowing the field down to 24 All-Stars, but if you sort everyone in the league with 300-plus minutes by the average of their ranks in five popular catch-alls (as well as the cumulative versions of each), you get a pretty reliable idea of who this season's best players have been.
Again, this isn't definitive. For example, it might be difficult to make a sincere argument that Kevin Love should be in All-Star consideration this season, even though the above pegs him as the East's 15th-best player so far. But it can still provide ranges and act as a decent guide, which is how we'll use it today.
So, with that serving as the backdrop, let's take a look at what the fans are getting right, as well as where they're way off, in the first batch of votes.
1. LeBron James: Too High (but probably in the right range)
2. Nikola Jokic: Too Low
Statistically speaking, no one else really has an argument for best player in the league right now.
Beyond posting a seemingly impossible 29.3 points, 16.1 rebounds and 8.0 assists per 75 possessions, Nikola Jokic is on pace to break the single-season record for box plus/minus.
And if that catch-all doesn't tickle your fancy, he's also the runaway leader in Dunks and Threes' estimated plus-minus, Basketball Index's LEBRON, FiveThirtyEight's RAPTOR and NBA.com's player impact estimate.
3. Paul George: Too High
Paul George deserves some credit for carrying the Los Angeles Clippers in the absence of Kawhi Leonard—but not this much.
Take off the numbers from his ridiculously hot start in L.A.'s first seven games, and PG is averaging 23.1 points while shooting 38.9 percent from the field and 28.1 percent from three.
And now that he's out with an elbow injury for the next several weeks, his stock is only going to drop more.
4. Andrew Wiggins: Too High (but knocking on the top 10's door)
Andrew Wiggins is clearly getting a Golden State Warriors boost here. Playing on a formerly dynastic team with one of the most popular players of all time clearly has its benefits.
It's not that Wiggins' stats are bad or undeserving of All-Star consideration. In fact, his points per game and effective field-goal percentage put him in pretty serious company. And his defense has been a key for the Warriors all season.
There just aren't enough ancillary contributions, particularly as a playmaker and rebounder, to warrant consideration as the West's fourth-best frontcourt player.
5. Draymond Green: Too High (but probably in the right range)
This is one where we can really get into a bit of a disagreement with the criteria. According to the catch-all exercise detailed above, Draymond is eighth among Western Conference frontcourt players, just behind Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Davis and Jonas Valanciunas.
Thing is, two of those players are on sub-.500 teams. AD has already missed 12 games (and counting). And so much of what Draymond does as the quarterback of the Warriors on both offense and defense is difficult for any stat to measure.
By letter of the law, we'll declare him a bit too high. When accounting for his intangibles and the fact that he's behind George and Wiggins, though, he might actually be too low.
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