Fan Voting Opens For 2015 All-Star Starters

Like watching your favorite players hoop? It’s more important now than ever to vote them as starters for the upcoming All-Star game; you might not get to see them play for an entire week if you don’t. Balloting for the 2015 NBA All-Star game has officially opened.

Every active player is included on the ballots for the first time in league history. Might this lead to a cult favorite like the Toronto Raptors’ Bruno Caboclo being voted a starter? Considering the honor of starting the midseason classic has increasingly less to do with on-court merit on a yearly basis, we certainly hope so.

Fans will select two guards and three frontcourt players as starters. As part of the NBA’s all-digital program, they can do so on NBA.com, through social media networks including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Sina Weibo and Tencent Microblog in China, via SMS text, and the NBA Game Time and NBA Game Time from Sprint applications. The league’s coaches choose the All-Star reserves at a later date.

What might our ballot look like? Here’s a rough draft. Keep in mind that this is a fluid exercise and player absences heavily influenced our assessment. We’re barely 20 games into the season, and there’s ample time for more analysis between now and when voting closes on January 19. Our five-man units:

West: Stephen Curry, James Harden, Blake Griffin, Anthony Davis, Marc Gasol

East: Kyle Lowry, John Wall, LeBron James, Chris Bosh, Pau Gasol

Good luck choosing among Curry, Harden, Chris Paul, Klay Thompson, Damian Lillard, Mike Conley, Monta Ellis, and Tony Parker among Western guards. It’s tough to go wrong with any of those choices, and it’s likely Russell Westbrook will force his way into consideration soon enough, too.

The same goes for guards in the East. There’s a legitimate case to be made for Dwyane Wade, DeMar DeRozan, Jimmy Butler, Kyrie Irving, and Jeff Teague as starters. This could all be solved by the league abandoning positional delineations for the five fan-voted spots, of course, but that would make far too much sense.

The 2015 All-Star Game will be played at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, February 15.

Who’s getting your vote?

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