Giannis Antetokounmpo And LeBron James Lead The First Round Of NBA All-Star Fan Voting

With just six weeks until the All-Star Game, voting for the starting lineups in the East and West is well underway for fans, and this year figures to feature some incredibly tough decisions for filling out the 12-man rosters in both conferences. There are a ton of deserving players, with a number of rising stars having big years and a lot of the familiar faces around the league continuing to play at a high level.

That means eventually we will get a number of snubs that had legitimate cases, but in the meantime, we will figure out who is going to get a guaranteed spot via the fan, media, and player voting section of the process for starters. Fan voting now accounts for 50 percent of the tally for starters, and the first round of voting results yielded very few surprises when the league released the voting numbers from the past two weeks.

While the captain format is gone, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo are still your leading vote getters, as they often have been since James moved West. The current starters in each conference, if chosen by the fans would look like this:

WEST

LeBron James
Kevin Durant
Nikola Jokic
Luka Doncic
Stephen Curry

EAST

Giannis Antetokounmpo
Joel Embiid
Jayson Tatum
Tyrese Haliburton
Damian Lillard

All of those 10 players are deserving and there won’t be anyone shocked by that list. That said, it was a bit surprising to me to find Tyrese Maxey in fifth in East guard voting at just 480,000 votes (and Jalen Brunson sixth at 375,000). Trae Young is within 100,000 votes of Lillard for the final starting spot among East guards, but he has historically not done well in player voting, so it’ll be interesting to see how that race shakes out once the players and media get tallied in. On the other side, Doncic and Curry leading Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in fan voting is no surprise, even if you can make the argument SGA deserves a starting spot in the West backcourt — he is a lock to be a coaches pick, so there won’t be any real snub issues there.

There really isn’t a race in either frontcourt, as the top-3 have a clear separation in the East and West, and I’d be shocked if anything changes there even with the players and media voting still yet to happen. The only real drama with starters will come via the players and media on the guard side, who could shake up those rosters a touch, but this gives us a good idea of who will be starting for the East and West in Indianapolis in February.