I love it when the NBA releases the preliminary results of fan voting for the All-Star Game. There's always some tempest-in-a-teapot outrage over something or other. Last year it involved Allen Iverson. I honestly can't remember how the Iverson scandal, on which the fate of the human race seemed briefly to hinge, got resolved. Was he hurt and so couldn't appear in the ASG? Was he overtaken in the voting? Doesn't matter. If he'd gone ahead and started for whichever conference officially employed him at the time, we'd all have forgotten about it 36 hours later.
Today the league announced the first returns on All-Star voting for the 2011 game, and Kobe Bryant is the overall leader with 720,000 votes and change. Pau Gasol is second among Western Conference forwards, behind Kevin Durant but with a slight lead over Carmelo Anthony. What jumps out at me, though, is the voting for center in the West and the curiously high standing of our man Derek Fisher.
Way, way ahead in the center voting is (no surprise) Yao Ming. He's played five games this year. In second place is Andrew Bynum, who's played two. In third is Brendan Haywood, who doesn't even start for Dallas. Theo Ratliff must be feeling pretty slighted right about now.
As for Fish, he checks in at 10th among Western Conference guards, about 300,000 votes behind Chris Paul for a starting slot. Can we agree that Fish starting in the All-Star Game would be damn near the greatest thing ever? I would try to organize some kind of grass-roots voter drive to get Fish his unfairly denied slot in the ASG, but I'm way too lazy for that. So I'll just say the following: if you're reading this, Fish needs your vote. Who the hell wants to see Chris Paul in the All-Star Game anyway? How many times has Chris Paul done this in the NBA Finals?
None! None many times. Therefore Derek Fisher is way better than Chris Paul. Sorry, Hornets fans, but it all adds up when you really stop to think about it.