Let’s get a few things straight about Thursday’s 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.
It didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things except this: it once 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 a fickle and unpredictable army, prone to whimsy and caring little for how it is told it should feel by the media, the 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? And what did the Thursday picks tell us about those who obsess over the league and its season-long soap opera of narrative-laced dramatics?
For a start, let’s get past this notion of NBA fans being baby-faced 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 all the way up 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.
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