Why Kemba Walker should have made the 2018 NBA All-Star team
The final slots for the 2018 NBA All-Star rosters were announced and the coaches selected 14 players to join the 10 starters that the fans, media and players voted for. Kemba Walker, of the Charlotte Hornets, was not among those 24 players selected to participate in the 2018 NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles.
To be fair, the Hornets currently sit 11th in the Eastern Conference standings, but they are only four games back of the eighth seed as of Tuesday night. Their head coach, Steve Clifford, just returned to the sideline after missing over a month of action dealing with an unidentified ailment. Nothing has seemingly gone to plan for Charlotte this year, but that hasn’t impacted Walker’s production on the court.
According to NBAWowy, the Hornets have outscored their opponents by 161 points with Walker on the floor, conversely that plummets when Walker sits, Charlotte has been outscored by 165 points without their star guard. For comparison, the 14-33 Orlando Magic have been outscored by 232 points total this season and the 31-18 Minnesota Timberwolves have outscored their opponents by 153 points on the year.
Walker alone has been able to get more out of this ragtag Hornets roster than can be reasonably expected when he is on the court. Charlotte even had a brief flirtation with him on the trade market in hopes that a team would be willing to part with the necessary young players and draft picks to give the Hornets a proper shot at rebuilding.
During each of his eight seasons in the NBA, Walker has shown steady progression and development in his game and now he’s at the point where he’s mirroring the magic he pulled off when he lead UConn to a national title as a senior on a nightly basis against the league’s best players.
I feel like these opinion pieces all have a section where two players’ statistics are “blindly” compared to each other and we’ve hit that point of this article.
Player A: 34.7 MPG 21.8 PPG, 5.9 APG, 3.4 RPG, 1.2 SPG, and 34.4 3PT%
Player B: 34.3 MPG, 19.3 PPG, 9.2 APG. 3.6 RPG, 1.3 SPG, and 34.8 3PT%
Player C: 33.0 MPG, 17.0 PPG, 6.7 APG, 6.0 RPG, 1.2 SPG, and 39.7 3PT%
Player A is Kemba Walker, Player B is John Wall, and Player C is Kyle Lowry. Wall and Lowry were selected as reserves whereas Walker was not. However, the numbers paint a different picture.
Aside from Kyrie Irving winning a glorified popularity vote, Lowry and Wall were the only two other point guards from the Eastern Conference to be chosen for the mid-year showcase. It can be argued that Walker has been the second best –if not THE best– point guard in the conference through 43 games.
It’s often argued that being on a winning team is a prerequisite to being honored as an All-Star but a player having a year like Kemba should be given special consideration. If the Hornets didn’t have him they would be part of the tanking effort to try and claim the number one overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft. The amount of weight and pressure on his shoulders on a nightly basis isn’t matched by many other stars across the league.
More than anything else, Walker is a true showman on the floor. Besides Irving and Stephen Curry, Walker is one of the most mesmerizing players to watch with the ball in his hands. Walker has all the dribble moves and step back finishes a guard can dream of. When the all-star game turns into a continuous one-on-one battle as it always does, Walker will go toe-to-toe with any player that is on the court.
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Getting out of Charlotte might be the best case scenario for all parties in this situation. Yet, Walker, for all his brilliance may still get overlooked even if he does end up elsewhere in the near future. Walker has shown the chops to stand alongside the best the game has to offer, however he won’t get a chance to prove that in Los Angeles and it is truly a shame.