Take it from me: Compiling All-Star ballot no easy task

Thanks to an All-Star ballot change, Tim Duncan (right) has a good chance to join center Yao Ming in the West's starting lineup. AP

The hubbub about NBA All-Star voting normally begins about the middle of January when fans from Team A suddenly realize that their guy is getting fewer votes than a less deserving guy from Team B. So Team A fans muster a campaign to get their guy more votes, then Team B fans respond in kind, and meanwhile China gets every living citizen to vote for its native sons, and, well, off we go.

The NBA enjoys this. More votes = more interest in the All-Star Game = more interest in the NBA in general. That is why the league allows the fans to vote in the five starters for each team while the coaches add the remaining seven players.

This year, however, the controversy started much earlier, as soon as the ballot came out containing the names of the 60 players from each conference who are eligible to get All-Star votes. I was was part of the seven-member media panel that put together the ballot, so I have something to say about the process, and, while I'm at it, answer charges that I'm an idiot.

Complaining about the All-Star ballot strikes me, first of all, as akin to complaining that the celery sticks served before a massive Thanksgiving dinner aren't crispy enough. People, there will be enough legit bitching to be done when the votes actually start coming in. But complaints there were.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was (is) miffed that his starting point guard, Devin Harris, was not on the ballot. "I don't know who actually puts the ballots together," Cuban wrote on his blog. "Supposedly its [sic] a bunch of media members (which may be all the explanation I need) who decide who is on or off." Key phrase: I don't know who actually puts the ballots together. Dude, it's not exactly a secret (the NBA listed the media members in its official announcement when the ballot was revealed Nov. 14).

Up in Seattle, meanwhile, Chris Wilcox was upset that he was not among the 24 Western Conference forwards chosen. He did not mention, but may have been thinking, that teammates Wally Szczerbiak and Nick Collison, both forwards who are having less productive years than he is, did make it. The Chinese press was outraged that we did not include Milwaukee rookie Yi Jianlian on the ballot, and one Web site proposed the dark question, Does the NBA want Yi Jianlian off the All-Star ballot? I'm pretty sure complaints about Phoenix's Boris Diaw exclusion appeared on his Web site, but they were written in his native language and I had only one semester of French a long time ago. No doubt there were other complaints, too.

The biggest and most legitimate noise, however, came from San Antonio, because we listed Tim Duncan as a center, not a forward, and that meant his streak of nine All-Star starts was in jeopardy. Why? Because the monumental online vote from China virtually guarantees that Yao Ming will be the starter at that position. (To be clear, the noise did not come from Duncan, who professed not to care.)

OK, here's the story, best as I can tell it.

First, I beg you to put aside foreboding thoughts of conspiracy, any belief that we get together in these conference-call sessions and say, "OK, who can we screw this year?" Whenever a media conspiracy is suggested, I have the same answer: We are far too disorganized to have a conspiracy. It's a minor miracle when we all manage to dial into the conference. There are no conspiracies. We try to do this equitably, not to mention quickly, though the "quickly" part usually disintegrates when we bicker about, say, who the 24th forward might be. (This year that did involve Wilcox.)

Anyway, keep in mind four points:

• The NBA mandates that the ballot be broken up by position, with 24 forwards, 24 guards and 12 centers per conference.

• The NBA mandates that all teams have at least three players represented.

• The NBA mandates that the committee meets before the season so the ballots are ready early. That means that decisions must be made on past performance and projections of current season performance.

• NBA reps are in on the conference call but, by and large, do not get involved in the decisions, though the league may make adjustments later. One of the adjustments they made this year after the ballot's release was putting Duncan back at forward. All members of the committee OK'd it in follow-up phone calls.

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