Mark Cuban Says NBA All-Star Fan Voting Is 'Absolutely, Positively Broken'
Outspoken Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban isn't a fan of the NBA's system for selecting All-Star starters, but his reasons are different than you might expect.
Normally we hear arguments about how the midseason competition is really nothing more than a popularity contest.
People complain about Kobe Bryant getting in rather than James Harden because he has a larger base of voters who want to see him in action. And that's not even the most egregious example, as a few years back, Yao Ming was voted in as a starter despite only playing in five games after sitting out the entire previous season.
But that's not Cuban's gripe, per ESPN.com's Tim MacMahon. He's not complaining about the lack of starters from his franchise, either:
"In context of everything, that's no votes. That's such a small number considering all the different options you have to vote that it's almost embarrassing. It's just no one's really looked at it that way. ... I mean, think about it.
Of all the people who go to games, all the people who watch games globally, to have [1.5] million means that system's broken. Absolutely, positively broken.
"
The leader of the Dallas franchise is referring to Stephen Curry's league-leading total of 1,513,324 votes. In his mind, that's not enough.
And he's right.
"But when the number of voters isn't enough to even get anybody to notice ... that means basically .01 percent of NBA fans cared enough to vote, and that's saying every fan voted just once," Cuban explained. "Probably, if you include global, that means .00001 percent of fans thought enough to vote. That just shows nobody cares."
It is surprising that only five players—including Harden, who didn't even get a starting nod—received more than 1 million votes. As Brett Pollakoff wrote for ProBasketballTalk, "The NBA has a global following, and the fact that the leading vote-getter (Stephen Curry) ended up with just over 1.5 million is an indicator that a certain level of apathy indeed exists."
Think about it this way. According to ESPN.com's attendance figures, if each team filled its arena to its season average, the total attendance across the league would be 529,314.
In one week, that's already more than 1 million people who have dipped into their savings and attended games. Over the course of a season, assuming each team hosts 41 games and there are no international affairs (which isn't true), that means 21,701,874 tickets will be sold.
Yes, 21.7 million tickets, all of which—save for a statistically insignificant number of free giveaways—actually cost money.
And 1.5 million is the leading vote total earned by Curry when it's free to vote? Hell, based on those attendance figures, the Golden State Warriors alone will sell 823,032 tickets to Oracle Arena during the 2014-15 campaign. Cuban continued:
"S--t, nobody even tried to hack it. That's how bored they are. So, yeah, I think it's time to do away with it because we're just not getting the response that matters. I don't know how votes have trended in terms of numbers versus past years, but it's obviously not something that fans really care about.
"
This issue isn't an easy one to fix, however.
Social media has encouraged more people to vote in recent years, with official Twitter feeds calling on their followers to support the teams' best players. Broadcasts of games advertise the methods of voting and make those same appeals to fanbases. It's a constant topic of discussion, and plenty of people seethe whenever voting results are updated midway through the process.
Perhaps it really is time to overhaul the entire process, even if it's not the "Player X made it, and Player Y didn't" argument serving as the impetus for change.
