The NBA announced this year’s 2026 All-Star starters on Monday. Alongside it, they released the raw voting totals from media members, fans, and players that comprised these results. As fanbases scour over the rankings and the results, looking for slights and injustices, I need everyone to understand something those totals underscored yet again: The players don’t take this stuff seriously. They never have.
Nikola Jokić and Cade Cunningham garnered the most votes from their NBA peers in each conference, respectively, which is good. They both had airtight cases, both were easy starting choices for my unofficial ballot, which you can check out here. (I was choosing, not predicting, but the only difference from the actual starting results was Jaylen Brown over Donovan Mitchell.) But the All-Star voting is trifold: A fan vote, which holds 50 percent of the weight; a media vote, which holds 25 percent; and the players, who select their own ballot of five names from each conference worth the remaining 25.
If the players’ votes were the only ones that mattered, the All-Star starters would look like this:
| WEST | EAST | |
| 1 | Jokić | Cunningham |
| 2 | Curry | Antetokounmpo |
| 3 | Gilgeous-Alexander | Brown |
| 4 | Edwards | Brunson |
| 5 | Durant | Maxey |
If this was this season’s actual All-Star ballot, it would be a poor representation of the Western Conference’s best. Luka Dončić, the league’s scoring leader, has been an undisputed top-five player but received only the sixth-most votes from players. Victor Wembanyama should be there, too, but he finished seventh. I could quibble with Gilgeous-Alexander finishing third behind Curry even while believing Curry should start. Still, none of this is egregious. Edwards and Durant are generational players in the midst of spectacular seasons; they’d worthy starters most years. I don’t believe they’re more worthy this season than the other two; I don’t think the players should think that, either. But the players can stick our heads into toilets and tell us, as Durant once said, “Who the fuck wants to look at graphs while having a hoop convo?” Whatever, it’s fine. Swirly me.
But here’s the thing: Perhaps some finished higher than they should, but the players barely even voted for them.
| WEST | VOTES | EAST | VOTES |
| Jokić | 135 | Cunningham | 159 |
| Curry | 123 | Antetokounmpo | 147 |
| Gilgeous-Alexander | 119 | Brown | 138 |
| Edwards | 95 | Brunson | 137 |
| Durant | 85 | Maxey | 132 |
There are about 450 players in the NBA at any given moment, of course, accounting for the occasional empty roster spot or hardship exception that swings the number up or down. The NBA tells me they received 386 total ballots from players. An overwhelming number of them participated. That means Cade Cunningham, the players’ overall leading vote-getter with 159 nods, was nominated by just 41 percent of his peers. And it only goes down from there.
Players and media members have votes because, a decade ago, a Vine star nearly got Zaza Pachulia voted in as a starter. I’m dead serious; he was about 15,000 votes shy. I even wrote about it back then for another outlet. And make no mistake: The media’s voting habits are nowhere near perfect, either. This year, the league had 99 media members vote on the starters. (The reserves are determined by the coaches, who do take this more seriously.) Only one player, Gilgeous-Alexander, received all 99 votes from them. Jokić was snubbed on four ballots. Antetokounmpo was left off 16. Bam Adebayo received two media votes, which is the most egregious example I found in the raw voting totals, which do not identify who cast said votes. I’ll say this: Every player who received an All-Star starting vote on a media ballot at least has a clear case to be an All-Star this season, even if those cases, such as Adebayo’s, clearly exist only on the fringes of the reserves.
The players do not have that shame.
The 386 voting players collectively nominated, on at least one ballot, 364 different players to be All-Star starters this season. Yes, the league confirms to me players can vote for themselves, and there were 122 players who received exactly one vote. Some examples of such single-vote players:
- Kyle Lowry
- Marvin Bagley III
- Eric Gordon
- Buddy Hield
- Al Horford
- Jonathan Kuminga
- Dennis Schröder
- Scoot Henderson
- Jeff Green
- Drew Timme
- Dario Saric
- Dejounte Murray
- Jayson Tatum
Tatum, Henderson, and Murray haven’t stepped onto the court this season, perhaps the most known examples but far from the only zero-minute votees. (Dallas’ Kyrie Irving got three.) Gordon has played 74 minutes this season; Green has played 66; Timme has 64; Lowry 45. Bronny James received two votes to be an All-Star starter this season. I wonder who those two voters might have been. Indiana’s Jay Huff got 11 nominations to be an All-Star starter. Chicago’s Isaac Okoro had six votes and Phoenix’s Grayson Allen nabbed 11. Denver’s Christian Braun got 16, which means he must have been supported from even beyond his own locker room. That had him ranked 27th among the player vote in the Western Conference, tying him with Utah’s Lauri Markkanen. (Braun has played 14 games this season.) Anfernee Simons appeared on 23 player ballots. He’s a legitimate sixth man candidate who’s absolutely torching it, but there were 23 players who felt he was one of the five most deserving players to start for the Eastern Conference’s All-Star game, who wrote him down accordingly as one of their five selections. He ranked 19th. I do feel it’s wrong Yang Hansen didn’t even get one. He’d never vote for himself, of course. If you want, feel free to scour these lists yourself for any amusing ones I surely missed. Here are the West’s votes and the East’s.
In the end, in the Eastern Conference, just a shade under 50 percent of the total votes went to the top-10 vote-getters. All of those top-10 candidates had real merit, however strained, to be considered a top-five player this season in their respective conference. The East’s 10th-most-voted-for player, Michael Porter Jr., should not start the All-Star Game, of course, but his candidacy as a reserve is incredibly real. In the West, it was a slightly lower 47 percent, but the same applies.
For what it’s worth, ever since the players began voting thanks to Zaza, it’s always been like this. This was what it looked like back in 2018.
Most players vote for themselves. That’s just their psyche. Then, more often than not, they add on teammates, friends, perhaps literally anyone they think it might be funny to write in. Most of these guys don’t, and can’t, watch the entire league extensively beyond what they see in game film. This isn’t an outrage. The top vote-getters still always are justifiable. The All-Star starters, to the extent it even matter, typically end up assigned to deserving players. And even if someone is snubbed, there’s no asterisk next to their All-Star appearance when they inevitably make it as a reserve.
It’s still funny, and one thing’s perfectly clear: Jayson Tatum totally voted for himself this year.