Charles Barkley Reveals Joel Embiid Probably Didn't Make All-Star Starting Lineup
Charles Barkley said on the radio on Wednesday morning that Joel Embiid probably didn’t make the All-Star game as a starter.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. The weeks of great content that came out of Joel Embiid’s All-Star game are now over, and now all Philadelphia 76ers fans can do is sit and wait to see how their efforts turned out.
To be an All-Star starter, you need to be one of the top three vote getters in your conference’s frontcourt. The NBA periodically released voting results from fan votes, and Embiid was, at one point, closing in on Kevin Love for the third spot.
Those fan votes didn’t take into account media voting of player voting, a new aspect of the All-Star voting this year.
The results and the starting lineup will be revealed Thursday on TNT, but Charles Barkley — one of the analysts for TNT’s NBA Countdown — got his hands on the list early, and may have inadvertently revealed that Embiid did not make the cut.
Barkley saying that he would pick Embiid as a reserve seems to imply that he didn’t make the starting lineup, which is going to be a huge bummer for Sixers fans who pushed so hard over the last few weeks to get him in and on the starting lineup.
One has to go back to 2011 to when Blake Griffin made the All-Star team as a rookie reserve to find the last time the NBA had a rookie in the All-Star game.
Sixers fans shouldn’t be too bummed about Embiid not being in the starting lineup, because there’s still a really good chance that he gets into the game as a reserve. With the noise he made as a front-runner for one of the open starter spots, the coaches — who make the decision on who the reserves are for their respective conferences — will definitely have Embiid on the forefront of their minds as one of the first players off of the bench during the All-Star game.
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