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Warriors' Steve Kerr: NBA players 'made a mockery' of their All-Star vote

Dan Devine
·Senior NBA writer
Steve Kerr isn't mad, NBA players. He's just disappointed, is all. (Getty Images)
Steve Kerr isn’t mad, NBA players. He’s just disappointed, is all. (Getty Images)

We noted Friday that NBA players didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory in their first crack at casting official votes for the annual NBA All-Star Game. It appears Steve Kerr noticed, too.

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During his chat with reporters before Monday’s game against the Miami Heat, the Golden State Warriors’ head coach took players to task for not taking their role in the NBA’s new All-Star voting system — under which fans account for 50 percent of the vote, while current players and a panel of media members each make up 25 percent of the total — very seriously. From Connor Letourneau of the San Francisco Chronicle:

“I am very disappointed in the players,” said Kerr, who cast his ballot Sunday for the reserves. “They asked for the vote and a lot of them just made a mockery of it. … I saw the list. I saw all the guys who got votes. Were you allowed to vote for yourself? I don’t know. Were guys voting for themselves? There were 50 guys on there that had no business getting votes.” […]

Among the eye-popping votes cast by the 324 players who submitted ballots — and, again, remember this was to pick who should start the All-Star Game, not just appear in it:

• Players who haven’t played a single game this season, whether due to injury or being buried on their team’s bench, like Mo Williams, Ben Simmons, Khris Middleton, Brice Johnson and Quincy Pondexter;

• Players who had logged fewer than 100 total NBA minutes this season, like Michael Gbinije, Georgios Papagiannis, Bryn Forbes, Daniel Ochefu, Pierre Jackson, Rakeem Christmas, Thon Maker, Marshall Plumlee, Daniel Ochefu, Adreian Payne, Mike Miller, John Lucas III and Quincy Acy; and

• Players who have gotten more significant spin, but who, um, don’t exactly fit the All-Star mold, like, Ben McLemore, Isaiah Whitehead, Jerian Grant, Jordan McRae, Jarell Martin, Alan Anderson, Matthew Dellavedova, Tomas Satoransky, Cameron Payne and Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot.

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There were lots of people who chose not to vote for very productive MVPs:

… and lots of people who got only one vote, leading some, including Kerr, to wonder just how many took full advantage of the right to vote for themselves:

… although, as SB Nation’s Tom Ziller suggested, they also might have just chosen to vote for one another. More from Kerr, via Letourneau:

“A lot of guys wrote in their buddies for the presidential campaign,” said Kerr […] “So maybe that was their own way of making a statement. But I think if you give the players a vote, they should take it serious.”

To be fair, Zaza Pachulia — the rough-and-tumble center, pride of the Republic of Georgia and Internet cause célèbre — received 19 votes to start in the West’s frontcourt, four more than Defensive Player of the Year favorite Rudy Gobert. One of his backups, JaVale McGee, got half as many votes (four) as minutes-per-game averaged (8.3). Andre Iguodala, scoring just under six points per game and playing the fewest minutes of his career, got three votes to start in the backcourt. Ian Clark, Shaun Livingston and rookie Patrick McCaw all got a single vote, too; Kerr’s Warriors don’t have totally clean hands in the “unserious ballot” department.

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Despite those “mock” votes, though, the players ultimately wound up with roughly the same starting lineups as the media members they so love to needle. Media members had LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jimmy Butler, Isaiah Thomas and DeMar DeRozan in the East; the player ballot swapped Kyrie Irving in for DeRozan, but was otherwise the same. There wasn’t even that level of disagreement in the West, as media and players alike chose Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Anthony Davis, Russell Westbrook and James Harden.

Neither Thomas nor Westbrook will start the Feb. 19 All-Star Game in New Orleans, thanks to fan-vote tiebreakers that broke in favor of Irving and Stephen Curry. That’s led to some arched eyebrows — especially in the case of Westbrook, who claims he doesn’t mind missing out on a starting not but who is also, in case you missed it, averaging a triple-double — and, in Kerr’s case, at least, some uncertainty about whether changing the system really changed all that much. From Ethan Sherwood Strauss of ESPN.com:

Kerr continued his thoughts on the disappointment. “So I don’t know what the point is. So that was too bad, but all in all, these things are always going to be debatable about who’s starting and who gets named. There’s always going to be worthy players left out of the starting lineup, left out of the roster entirely. It’s the same thing every year, and I don’t know what the perfect answer is.”

The Warriors lost on Monday to the Dion Waiters-led Miami Heat, but when the Milwaukee Bucks knocked off the Houston Rockets, Kerr and his staff were locked into coaching the Western Conference All-Stars at this year’s All-Star Game. (Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs coached last year, making him ineligible, so Houston’s loss clinched Golden State having the best record in the West as of Feb. 5 among teams with eligible coaches.) We’re sure Kerr is looking forward to taking advantage of his opportunity to discuss serious alternative solutions — not, we stress, alternative facts — with the West’s players once he gets to the Big Easy.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!