The thing about basketball is you want to be good at it. If you’re good at it, and I mean like really, really good, you get to be in the NBA. Being a man helps too. Especially cis men. To my knowledge, everyone in the NBA is a cis dude. That’s way above average.
Anyway, if you’re really, really good compared to the other really, really good players, you might get voted to be an All-Star. All-Stars are the best. They’re super cool. :)
But the very best players? The ones you think of and go “that’s my dude”? They’ve probably been All-Stars more than once. Twice or eight times even.
These are the players you want on your NBA team. Typically, NBA teams that win the NBA Championship have at least one All-Star. For example, the 2015 Atlanta Hawks had four whole All-Stars in their starting lineup! That’s why they won the season probably!
Now a whole lot of other things go into winning. For example, there’s “actually playing the game and defeating the other team” and “beating your opponent by outscoring them,” but those things are mid. Let’s return our focus to having All-Stars. Multi-time All-Stars. The more multi-time, the better.
Sure. Whatever you say, Mat.
Thanks!
Since we’re on the same page, we’re going to reimagine the standings not by wins (again, mid) but by the amount of All-Star appearances per team. What can we glean from this? I haven’t figured it out at the time of writing this sentence, but I really want to. Tell you what. The next sentence will be an update from future me to let you know if there is anything of value to any part of this:
“Yes.”
Now that that’s been established, I want to pass along a few random bits of information I learned.
There is only one person whose last name begins with ‘z’ that has been named an All-Star. His name was Max Zaslofsky. That’s pretty cool. When he retired he was only behind George Mikan and Jumpin’ Joe Fulks as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.
The only team that does roster a current or former All-Star is the Portland Trail Blazers. That is not to say they don’t have future All-Stars, but that’s where we’re at now. Dominayton has really been showing age lately. Not age. Signs. He’s been showing signs.
The Pistons would have been in that same group were it not for Cade Cunningham. Do you notice how the Pistons are actually kind of fun this year? That’s because they have an All-Star and not the other way around.
Combining all team-wide historic All-Star appearances, LeBron James has more All-Star appearances himself than the aggregate of all players on 25 different teams. Does that sentence make sense? I’ll have a picture later.
LeBron has been an All-Star 21 times. You can only be an All-Star once per year. That is nuts.
On to the standings
The NBA standings, sorted by number of historic All-Stars per team, look something like this (overall seed in parentheses).
I wanted to make the standings prettier, so I put them in my favorite graphic editing program:
I can’t say they look much better.
One might notice that the Philadelphia 76ers… that they’re uh… they’re quite high by this metric. Here’s a breakdown by team rather than seeding:
So many All-Stars are in the Western Conference. Now, if you were to switch all the players on Western Conference teams to Eastern Conference teams, the Eastern Conference would have more All-Stars, but no one ever talks about that. What if the Lakers and Celtics traded? That’d be messed up.