The All-Star break is creeping up, with the league’s best and brightest set to descend on Southern California and the Intuit Dome on February 15. As for the format, your guess is as good as mine. Something involving USA versus the World, or some other experimental twist the league cooked up in a boardroom. The details are still fuzzy for me, which somehow feels very on brand for the event at this point.
What was not surprising at all was the list of starters. Devin Booker was not on it. When the league
made things official yesterday, his name was nowhere to be found, and that part barely moved the needle.
And honestly, that tracks.
Booker is not the type of player who racks up a massive fan vote by bouncing from franchise to franchise. You can be annoyed that he pulled in only 418,652 fan votes, sure. If everyone in the greater Phoenix area, roughly 5.19 million people, clicked his name one time, he would have walked in as a starter. That is not how this works, and I am fine with that.
I do not ever expect him to be voted in as a starter. Not in a conference loaded with former MVPs and international stars who carry the weight of entire countries behind them. We have seen this movie before. The Yao Ming years taught us that lesson loud and clear. If you are an international player, the fan vote is going to lean your way.
To the league’s credit, they have tried to balance the popularity contest. Starters are now decided by 50% fan vote, 25% player vote, and 25% media vote. It helps. It does not change the reality. Booker has never been about the pageantry. He has always been about the work.
And that is where this conversation gets interesting.
Booker finished 16th in fan voting in the West, but 9th in player vote and 12th with the media. That tells you a lot. For one, this is a brutal field. The Western Conference is stacked, and sorting through fringe All-Stars is not an easy job for anyone. Devin Booker lives right in that space this season.
I still believe he should represent the Suns. The All-Star Game is not only about raw numbers. It is about stories. About freezing a season in time and remembering what mattered when you look back years later. And the Suns are one of the best stories in the league. Full stop.
That said, this is not a classic Devin Booker statistical year. We have covered that ground. His value shows up in the margins, in how he impacts winning beyond the box score. But when you stack that against other fringe cases, like Jamal Murray doing what he is doing in Denver, especially without Jokic, it becomes a real debate. Not disrespectful. Not dismissive. Just complicated.
The player vote is the part that really jumps out to me. It is the reminder that your favorite player’s favorite player is Devin Booker. He is a hooper’s hooper. The guys who actually play this game respect what he does and how he goes about it. That is why he landed 9th in the Western Conference among players.
Now we wait for the rest of the picture. The All-Star reserves will be revealed at 4 p.m. Arizona time on February 1, with the remainder of the roster announced on NBC and Peacock. That is when we find out whether Booker gets his spot.
And for anyone keeping score at home, Dillon Brooks finished 21st in the player vote and 24th in the fan vote.
