The NBA released the first returns for All-Star voting on Thursday, with plenty of surprises early on.
LeBron James and Giannis Antetounkmpo lead their conferences respectively, with Joel Embiid in second for frontcourt voting and Tyrese Maxey fifth for backcourt voting.
Thus far, Embiid has been even better than last year’s MVP campaign and the early returns reflect that. He’ll almost certainly get a starting spot for the sixth consecutive year. Maxey, on the other hand, is where things may get controversial.
Currently, Maxey is roughly 140,000 votes behind Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell, nearly 400,000 votes behind Atlanta’s Trae Young, and nearly 500,000 votes behind Milwaukee’s Damian Lillard.
Tyrese Haliburton leads the backcourt vote, with nearly 1.4 million votes.
That’s a decent amount of room to make up if Maxey has any chance of a starting spot on the 2023 All-Star game.
Still, there’s plenty of time for both Embiid and Maxey to solidify their All-Star cases.
There’s also the factor that fans account for 50% of the vote to decide All-Star starters, with NBA players and a media panel accounting for 25% of the vote each.
For avid voters: fan votes will count for three times tomorrow, during a special 3-for-1 day.
Voting will continue through Saturday, Jan. 20 with the All-Star game starters revealed on Thursday, Jan 25 on the NBA on TNT.
The next fan vote update will drop a week from now on Jan. 11. Better get those votes in in the meantime.
