Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban said the current NBA All-Star Game voting system is "absolutely, positively broken," according to Corbett Smith of the DALLAS MORNING NEWS. The All-Star starters were announced last week, with Warriors G Stephen Curry receiving the most votes at "a little over 1.5 million." Cuban: "In the context of everything, that’s no votes. That’s such a small number considering all the different options that you have to vote, that it’s almost embarrassing. No one even tried to hack it. That’s how bored they are. ... Now, if we were getting 20 million All-Star votes, or the winner was getting that, it would be different" (DALLAS MORNING NEWS, 1/24). But in Denver, Christopher Dempsey wrote the NBA is a league that "averaged 15.5 million viewers of the NBA Finals last season" and one in which 11 teams "are worth more than a billion dollars." Dempsey: "And the fans are not speaking? Maybe not. They're yelling. They're yelling so loudly that in 27 fewer days than last season, and with no paper ballots available, the NBA still got a 28 percent increase in ballots cast." That is "nearly a month of less time to vote, with the entire NBA to sort through, and with teams pushing fans to basically vote for all of their players." Those "aren't the earmarks of a broken system" but rather of one "that is thriving" (DENVER POST, 1/25).
