Snubs and Where to Find Them

The 2023 All-Star Player Pool has been fully revealed. Who were the biggest snubs for this year’s Midseason Classic?

[Ed. note: This article was originally published at raymondsimms.com, a temporary personal blog I ran during the 2022-23 basketball season. It was ported over to Crucial Baskets on April 20, 2024.]

Each season, 24 players (12 per conference) get the opportunity to be called NBA All-Stars, give or take any injury replacements. Naturally, with any list, there are bound to be players worthy of it that will be left off. By extension, there will be people mad that those players are left off.

Backers of various players will treat these “snubs” like injustices. “How could they forget my guy? It’s so obvious they should be an All-Star!” That’s the price of sports fandom, and I don’t begrudge those backers for their beliefs. But if we look at the All-Star selections through a statistical lens, which players have the most legitimate gripe for being left out of the All-Star fray?

To determine this answer, I simply looked at player VORP. Value Over Replacement Player is a box score estimate of points per 100 team possessions that a player contributes over a replacement level player, pro-rated to an 82-game season. I feel like it’s the second-most succinct advanced stat publicly available, bested only by Fivethirtyeight’s RAPTOR ratings. You just look at it and get a straightforward look at that player’s impact. I’m a big fan of it.

So when cross-referencing the All-Star pool with league VORP rankings (as of February 2, 2023), the top 13 and 16 of the top 17 all rightfully got the nod. That odd man out? Miami’s Jimmy Butler, whose 3.1 VORP is 14th-best in the NBA. James Harden (18th, 2.4), Anthony Davis (19th, 2.4), Nikola Vucevic (20th, 2.2), Jalen Brunson (21st, 2.1), Darius Garland (23rd, 2.1), and Pascal Siakam (24th, 2.0) are other players within the Top 24 that were left out of the All-Star player pool.

Conversely, Memphis’ Jaren Jackson Jr. is the lowest-ranked All-Star, his 1.3 VORP being 51st-best in the NBA. Zion Williamson (27th, 1.9), DeMar DeRozan (28th, 1.8), Bam Adebayo (34th, 1.7), Paul George (36th, 1.7), Jrue Holiday (42nd, 1.5), and Jaylen Brown (47th, 1.4) join Jackson Jr. as players outside of the Top 24 that received an All-Star nod.

Personally, I don’t get revved up by All-Star snubs. Coming up with All-Star teams in such a talent-rich league means plenty of deserving players are going to be left off. Not to mention that the All-Star rosters are serving multiple goals. The starter votes are a convergence of three popularity contests (fans, players, and media). Then the coaches, who are more focused on their own teams than the rest of the league, make up the difference with the reserve selections. That’s four separate factions of biases. Someone is bound to fall through the cracks. That’s just human nature.

Nevertheless, it was still fun to carry out this statistical exercise to see which players were ultimately left holding the bag. All things considered, I think this a pretty well-constructed player pool. I’m looking forward to seeing who captains Giannis Antetokounmpo and LeBron James will pick when they make their selections right before the 2023 All-Star Game on February 19th in Salt Lake City, Utah.