MDP Live - The NBA All Star 2022 will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, on February 20. Voting by fans has begun on December 25, 2021 and will end on January 27, 2022. In the process, fans can vote using Twitter, the official website, and also the NBA application.
As with previous events, the NBA will announce the preliminary results of the voting in the middle of their allotted time. This year, there are three announcement time windows and the first one comes as of today, Thursday, January 6, 2022, local time. The other two windows in a row will be announced every Thursday for the next two weeks.
For this first window, in the Eastern Conference, you could say there were two surprise names on the announced list. This name is included in the surprise category if we look in the mirror with its performance. It is Kyrie Irving who sits at number six on the Eastern Conference guard voting list with 267,292 votes. Kyrie has only played one game so far this season.
Just below Kyrie, another surprise was Derrick Rose who got 232,501 votes. Rose's performance is not special, it even tends to decrease from previous seasons. Rose was also injured until he had only played 26 games. However, Rose is known to have a large line of rabid fans. His name always appears when a new vote involves only fans.
These two players are ahead of two hot Eastern Conference guards, Darius Garland and Fred VanVleet. In fact, the number of votes collected by Garland and VanVleet when combined is still less than the votes collected by Rose.
For the Eastern Conference, the highest number of votes went to Kevin Durant with 2,360,435 votes. He is more than 200,000 votes ahead of Giannis Antetokounmpo. Both of them occupy the frontcourt position. For the guard line, DeMar DeRozan, who is currently in full swing, is far ahead of James Harden.
Shifting to the Western Conference, the newly established Stephen Curry as the best marksman in NBA history leads the list. Curry even got the most votes in this first window with 2,584,623 votes, more than 500 thousand votes ahead of LeBron James in second place in the Western Conference.
Similar to the Eastern Region, the Western Region also gave rise to two surprise names. In the frontcourt, in fourth place, there is the name Andrew Wiggins. In terms of performance, Wiggins has been very solid this season. However, the appearance of a Canadian player in fourth place, only lost to LeBron, Nikola Jokic, and Paul George, was unexpected by many.
In the guard line, at the same rank as Wiggins, was his team-mate, Klay Thompson. Klay has yet to appear this season. Let alone this season, Klay has not appeared in the NBA in two calendar years. Apparently, this is what actually prompted fans to see Klay appear on All Star.
The NBA All Star voting itself won't just take away fan votes. Later, journalists from selected media and all NBA players. The two players with the highest votes from each region will be crowned captains and will be entitled to choose their team. Systemically, this election is still using the last season's system.
