Kristian Winfield: NBA All-Star votes or win shares? Jalen Brunson is about the latter

Of course LaMelo Ball has more fan votes than any NBA guard not named Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

The NBA All-Star Game starters have always been decided by a fan-driven popularity contest.

If it were based on win shares, Jalen Brunson would already have his jersey framed in San Francisco as a unanimous starter.

But win shares are boring. Bring on the one-legged stepbacks sent Patrick Ewing into a raging fury.

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Have you ever had a coach flame you during a timeout like this? 😭 #patrickewing #micdup #collegebasketball #cbb

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This is the “Do you work on that shot?” era of basketball, where “Wait, isn’t that a travel?” meets “Wait, how did that even go in?”

Few players blur the line between the spectacular and the surreal quite like Ball, the franchise centerpiece of the 7-25 Charlotte Hornets. His dazzling individual numbers — 30 points, 7 assists, and a steal and a half per game — help numb the reality of his team hurtling toward its third straight sub-30-win season.

Yet this is the will of the people, and the people have spoken: They want to be entertained.

Ball is the NBA’s premier entertainer. He eschews the final score for the box score and has turned the Spectrum Center into a playground.

Ball is the embodiment of TikTok-era basketball, a walking highlight reel tailor-made for a generation that consumes the game through 45-second clips.

After all, who needs a spike in real-time viewership when millions will watch it in snippets anyway?

This is the “clip it and ship it” hoops generation. And those same clips don’t exactly play nice with the style of basketball Brunson and the Knicks are winning with.

The Knicks are predictably unpredictable. Gone are the days when Brunson needed to drop 40 for the Knicks to have a chance.

Now, any given night can belong to someone new. Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, and OG Anunoby have all logged 40-point games this season, and Josh Hart just became the first Knick to post triple-doubles in back-to-back games since Michael Ray Richardson in 1981.

New York will have at least one starter in San Francisco on Feb. 16: Karl-Anthony Towns, the centerpiece of the offseason trade that sent Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo to Minnesota.

Towns ranks third in fan voting among Eastern Conference frontcourt players, trailing only Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo. All three have crossed the 1-million-vote threshold, the only East players to do so.

Brunson, meanwhile, faces steeper odds. He is likely earn his second straight All-Star appearance coming off the bench as a coach-picked reserve.

Last season, Brunson earned more player and media votes than Damian Lillard but lost the starter race after trailing the Milwaukee Bucks star by 700,000 fan votes, with the gap doubling in-between the first and second returns.

This year, Brunson trails both Donovan Mitchell and Lillard by more than 200,000 votes, and TikTok Ball has made first place unreachable.

But while All-Star fan votes dominate headlines, Brunson and the Knicks have their sights set on something far more meaningful: maintaining the league’s fourth-best record (24-10) and expanding the gap between wins and losses.

That will only come by playing “boring basketball.”

Hero ball benefits the individual. Winning is the Knicks’ real metric of success.

Brunson might lose the All-Star starter race, and if the Knicks win enough games to justify his place in the MVP conversation, he’ll likely fall short in that race, too.

Nikola Jokic, averaging a triple-double, remains the overwhelming favorite for his fourth MVP in five years.

Yet Jokić nor the Nuggets are particularly concerned about MVP honors. They’ve been to the mountaintop, winning the 2023 NBA title, and they know their current pace (19-13) isn’t enough for a team with championship aspirations.

The Knicks, on the other hand, are on time. Fourteen games above-.500, one might say they’re ahead of schedule.

It might not be flashy. It won’t go viral on social media every night, either, but in New York, chasing a title matters far more than All-Star nods or MVP trophies.

Ball deserves to be an All-Star starter. He’s mastered the art of going viral, captivating fans with his jaw-dropping plays and fearless creativity. He’s exactly who the people want to see—a player willing to redefine what’s possible at the professional level, win-loss column be damned.

But while Ball’s video-game numbers and billions of social media views keep fans entertained, Charlotte would undoubtedly trade his fan votes for Brunson’s win shares.

Because when the final buzzer sounds, winning is the ultimate currency — even if it means sacrificing the spotlight, the accolades.

Even if it means sacrificing entertainment.