How the NBA can fix its all-star voting process to help ensure the most deserving players are recognized.
The Golden State Warriors forward wasn’t the only person asking that question when TNT revealed the starters for next month’s showcase. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry and Giannis Antetokounmpo were all headed to Cleveland as expected. But Wiggins?
In the Bay Area, Wiggins’s selection was cast as a just honor for his dependable two-way play for a leading title contender and as a long-awaited payoff for a former No. 1 pick who has never quite lived up to that top billing.“The journey he has traveled has been rocky at times,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said. “To see how hard he’s worked and to see all the work rewarded, I just could not be happier for him. The whole organization is glowing right now.
Players who fit Wiggins’s bill as a complementary option on a winning team are typically left to fight for one of the last few all-star reserve spots. That’s exactly what would have happened if the starters were selected by the media or the players; both groups cast more votes for Green and Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert than for Wiggins. In the media category, it wasn’t even close: Gobert received 65 votes, Green received 20, and Wiggins got just four.
Wiggins pulled in 771,000 all-star votes last year — just 22 percent of this year’s tally — and didn’t place among the top 15 in jersey sales in the NBA’s most recent rankings. While he is one of the league’s highest-profile Canadian players and Golden State has one of the largest and most engaged fan bases, Wiggins still has just 519,000 Twitter followers, placing him below both Green and Gobert and well behind A-listers such as James and Curry .
One key driver of Wiggins’s overnight ultra-popularity: an influential new supporter. BamBam, a K-pop star with 9.6 million Twitter followers and the Warriors’ new
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