Changing WNBA All-Star Voting

This is something that rankles me (and not a few commentators) every All-Star break: the fan voting doesn’t really make sense, and is often (or seems to be) influenced by turn-out the vote rallies at home games and also a little bit of ballot stuffing. Now, I realize that this is supposed to be a game for the fans (aren’t all the games supposed to be for the fans?), but I think they get too much influence. For an All-Star game to mean something, I think it should be

This is something that rankles me (and not a few commentators) every All-Star break: the fan voting doesn’t really make sense, and is often (or seems to be) influenced by turn-out the vote rallies at home games and also a little bit of ballot stuffing. Now, I realize that this is supposed to be a game for the fans (aren’t all the games supposed to be for the fans?), but I think they get too much influence. For an All-Star game to mean something, I think it should be populated by the best of the best, not by the most favored (or worse, most-ballot-stuffed) of the best. But how?

The cop-out method would be to use something like the WNBA’s efficiency rankings, or some such. While wholly impartial, it doesn’t count for the intangibles such as leadership, savvy, and other stuff including non-existent stats (like assist attempts).

That being the case, let’s have the player’s own peers make the choices (admittedly, this might also let some favoritism leak in). Coaches and players vote for their conference’s selections in late June, but they can’t vote for players on their own teams, players that have played in fewer than half the games their current team has played, nor players from the opposing conference (this to avoid attempts to weaken the opposing conference’s team). For each conference, the top three guards, top three forwards, and top two centers voted in are on the squad.

NOW we factor in the fan votes. Where there is overlap with the fan list, those are the starters (if there is no overlap, then it’s league choice). To fill out the rosters for each conference, the top 3 picks on the fan’s list who aren’t already in the lineup will make the final three spots for each team as reserves (so, we still allow for a few fan favorites to be in the game).

This will probably break as well, but I think while it still allows fans to vote in popular players, it’s not at the expense of those less popular, or not-quite marquee, players who just happen to be having an outstanding season. Overall, since the players in each conference want their conference to win the All-star game (maybe there could be some conference-wide monetary bonus), there is incentive to field the best possible teams.