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The 2014 All-NBA Teams Are Out — Here’s Everything Wrong With Them
The final set of post-season awards has been handed out in the form of the All-NBA teams. Taken together, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd teams should amount to the 15 best players in the NBA, a sort of “second” All-Star team set that doesn’t leave the results up to regular folks like you and me. The right to vote for these awards are given only to the most respected and notable names in media, such as a guy who gave David Lee an
All-Defense vote by accident.
Here are your All-NBA teams:
1st Team: Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Joakim Noah, James Harden, Chris Paul
2nd Team: Blake Griffin, Kevin Love, Dwight Howard, Stephen Curry, Tony Parker
3rd Team: Paul George, LaMarcus Aldridge, Al Jefferson, Goran Dragic, Damian Lillard
A decent list. If by decent, you mean decently flawed. I have many questions for you, voters and readers:
First, we should note that LeBron James was NOT an unanimous pick for first team. How? Why?
Chris Sheridan is either being a huge troll or was severely hammered during the entire regular season. LeBron would have made a worthy MVP pick this year. Sheridan must have an axe to grind with the King. Stupid.
James Harden, first team? Seriously
We can’t stress this enough: James Harden is a
terrible defender. He’s worse than terrible, actually, because he appears actively apathetic and disdainful of the practice. What’s one thing you can say about all the other guys on the first team? Well, you could say a lot, but one of those things is that they’re all two-way players. James Harden couldn’t play defense if his team’s season depended on it,
and it did, at one point. He’s an outstanding scorer and has quick hands, but he’s nowhere close to being a complete player. Third team, at the best.
How does a guy who missed a quarter of the season make the first team?
Chris Paul is a great player and one of, if not the best, point guards in the league. That being said, he played 62 games this year. He averaged fewer points per game than guards Stephen Curry (second team), Damian Lillard (third team) and Kyle Lowry (no team). Most damning of all, his team played extremely well when he was injured. Maybe this was a function of needing two guards and two forwards, but Blake Griffin was better this year and deserved to leap frog his teammate. Guys who miss 20 games don’t deserve such an accolade.
That being said, let me turn around and contradict myself with this question:
Where is Russell Westbrook?
There’s one reason why Westbrook didn’t deserve a first team spot this year, and that’s because he was injured for half of it. But despite only playing 46 games, he dominated: He averaged 26.7 points per game (good for fourth in the league) playing alongside another heavy-usage player in MVP Kevin Durant; he averaged 8.1 steals per game (good for third in the league); he averaged 2.16 steals per game (tied for second in the league). He was a walking highlight reel and, at times, better than Durant this year. He deserved at least a third team spot.
Okay, how about Carmelo Anthony?
Don’t give me the “Knicks were terrible this year” line. If team record factors into this, what’s Kevin Love doing on the second team? Melo was better than ever this year, especially in regards to rebounding and defense, but played on a bad team that needed him to do things like drop 62 points in a game. He was second in scoring. I would take him over Love in a heartbeat.
Goran Dragic + Damian Lillard? That’s your third best backcourt?
Guys who should have been third team over Dragic and Lillard: Kyle Lowry, John Wall, Mike Conley. Look, both Dragic and Lillard had fantastic seasons, and I’m personally a huge fan of them both. But they’re not Top-15 players in this league, not yet.
You’re not actually saying Paul George is better than Carmelo Anthony, Dirk Nowitzki or even Anthony Davis, right?
George isn’t even the best player on his team. He can score sometimes, doesn’t distribute and gets by mostly by being a great defender. That’s not enough. Sorry.
I’m starting to think it was a bad idea for the NBA to release the
complete media voting resultsfor its awards. Transparency is a good thing, but knowing where to direct my mean Twitter comments isn’t good for anyone involved here. I’m also done thinking that media members getting votes makes more sense than the fans voting. There are some no-brainer choices here, and the rest are just questionable.
Plus, it’s ridiculous that the NBA forces voters to pigeonhole players into certain positions, when in reality some of these guys can play anywhere from shooting guard to power forward depending on the lineup. The court is a nebulous place — there should be equal amounts of wiggle room on the ballot.
