James and Durant lead the audience vote for the All-Star Game
The Los Angeles Lakers, LeBron James, and the Brooklyn Nets, Kevin Durant, lead the audience vote for the traditional “All-Star” match, which annually brings together the stars of the NBA, according to preliminary results that were revealed today, Thursday.
15 days after voting opened, “King” James ranked first with 3,168,694 votes, while Durant came in second with 3,118,545 votes.
In the event that the two players remain at the top of the vote, they will be chosen as captains for the western regions of James and the eastern regions of Durant.
The All Star match will be held on February 19 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
James and his team are not going through their best conditions this season, as the Lakers are moving away from the “Playoff” playoffs by occupying the twelfth place in the Western Region standings, while the “King” hopes to compensate for this failure, by writing his name in the golden record of the league as the best scorer in history.
James, who currently averages 29 points per game this season, can overtake the historic top scorer, legend Karim Abdul-Jabbar (38.387 points) in February, even before the “All Star” match, in which he is expected to participate for the 19th time, which is a record. He will also share it with Abdul-Jabbar.
As for Durant, after a very poor start to the Nets, he managed to lead his team to 12 consecutive victories recently, before the Chicago Bulls stopped his winning streak, yesterday, Wednesday.
Behind James and Durant are the two stars of the Milwaukee Bucks, the Greek Yannis Antetokounmpo, who is close to the 3 million vote mark, and the Denver Nuggets, the Serbian Nikola Jokic, the best player in the past two seasons, with 2,237,768 votes.
And if the current picture does not change by the 21st of this month (voting ends date), Anthony Davis (Lakers), Stephen Curry (Golden State Warriors) and Slovenian Luka Doncic (Dallas Mavericks) will complete the Big Five in the West, along with James and Jokic.
In the east, Joel Embiid (Philadelphia Seventy Sixers), Kyrie Irving (Brooklyn Nets) and Donovan Mitchell (Cleveland Cavaliers) come right behind Durant and Antetokounmpo.
The audience votes constitute 50 percent of the selection process for the two main formations, with the other 50 percent coming equally between players and journalists.
As for the reserve players, they are chosen by the league coaches, provided that the league commissioner Adam Silver takes over the process of naming the replacements, in the event that any player in the two teams is injured.