http://www.nba.com/2009/allstar2009/01/23/fran.yao.012309/index.html I like Battier's attitude about it.
hahaha. nice for those who are lazy, here's the quote: "Hey, I clip those voting results out of the newspaper. I'll save them for my kids and someday I'll pull them out and say, 'Hey, look here. Your old man was once a pretty good ballplayer. Look at all the votes he got for the All-Star Game.'"
Too Funny!!! But yeah, Alston has baseball gloves for hands, geesh, no wonder he has such a low turnover rate.
That's one of the key physical attributes for being a good ball handler--big hands. John Stockton's hands were supposed to be disproportionately large.
Good read. But Byron Scott should stfu. NBA is a entertainment business and it is all about entertaining the fans with the players the FANS like!
I would rather think it is "Rockets effect". Les had vision and did put up a lot of effort to introduce NBA and Rockets to China after he acquired Yao Ming. So that many players in Rockets are well known in China. When Yao came to NBA in 2002, there is indeed "Yao effect" so he can entered the all-star during Rookie year. But now, even Dwight Howard is more popular than Yao among China NBA fans. Maybe that is why D-Howard get the most votes in All-star. See the jerseys sale in China. http://www.nba.com/news/kobepopularjersey_080812.html And talking about all-star, it is fan base vote. So you are choosing the MOST POPULAR players, not the BEST players. The fact is, T-mac is more popular than Chris Paul in US and in China. http://www.nba.com/news/jersey_080326.html Even Houston has 4 times more population than New Orleans. I believe Chris won the all-star votes just because medias kept attacking T-mac and put the blame on China voters, plus T-mac did refuse to go to all-star game. http://blog.nola.com/hornetsbeat/2009/01/chris_paul_being_behind_tracy.html If Chris had lose the all-star vote, he could only blame Hornets marketing group not doing their jobs.
I wish Fran had at least discussed the "overseas" balloting in context of Yao where he has always won the paper ballot here. And if he's going to talk about fan voting he should have acknowledged that the larger media markets tend to receive a disproportionate number of votes. In short he could have defended Yao's seletion more, and emphasized the usually whacked-out domestic fan voting. But it's for NBA.com and the league is fast approaching MLB's lack of regard for the integrity of their spot, so... who cares?
NBA people just don't get it. If you truly truly don't want this to be a popular contest, then why continue writing articles about how much the Yao effect had on his teammates regard to voting. Why not write an article about how stupid the voting system is and how unfair it is to have players that got voted in when they shouldn't and try to persuade the NBA commissioners to change their voting system. This way, you don't have to keep bringing this shyt up every year about how unfair that certain players get in and some done!!
NO, they do get it, and get it very well. If you blame the league or Stern, there will be consequences. If you blame Yao or China, what's the harm? Maybe not belong here, but that's exactly the same reason every single politician plays hardball against China during elections. Once you are in, business as usual. Writers or reporters blame Chinese fans, so what? NBA will still sell jerseys in China.