All Stars

PARIS (The Monday International Show) - The votes are all in, now it's time to analyse the public's and coaches' selections.

Great international presence in the rookie challenge withBargnani, Horford (dominican), Scola, Yi and Navarro but no Noah despite his top per minute rating among all the rookies.

His low playing time and henceforth low overall stats openned the door for Jeff Green who has a bigger rôle with Seattle.

To make the rookie challenge more interesting and competitive, they should play a whole, real game with 12-man rosters and not cheapen the event with a shortened game and nine(?) man rosters!

I do feel that with three 27- year old rookies this year that the game will be worth watching because the sophomores should be less dominating!

On to the selections for the big game where the fans did a good job naming the starters, avoiding an embarrassing situation for T-Mac!

However, there are noted differences between the fan vote and the coaches' vote concerning the reserve players.

For the east, Billups, Hamilton, Jamison and Joe Johnson were chosen by the coaches despite those four players trailing far behind in the fan voting!

For the west, Brandon Roy and David West are the coaches' surprise choices even though they are completely justified by their team and individual results.

It's the year of the west's first- place Hornets with Paul, West and coach Byron Scott joining the party on their home turf!

The international presence will only be felt in the west thanks to Nash, Dirk, Duncan(?) and Yao because the east squad is 100 percent USA!

Dirk made a typically classy gesture saying his teammate Josh Howard deserved to be named as much as him!

Former international all-stars like Gasol, Ginobili, Parker, Kirilenko and Okur will not be part of the west squad this time since, in general, their teams' results are not up to par with their expectations!

The two biggest injustices occur in the very deep west selections where Baron Davis has a better efficiency rating than Nash and Iverson and Chris Kaman, the neo-german Minnesota farm phenom, is not selected despite being tenth in overall NBA efficiency!

Statswise, Kaman, who oddly is neither a fan nor a coaches favorite, as well as Al Jefferson, could have covetted David West's spot but the team results once again made the difference!

No big injustice in the east despite Ray Allen being a fan favorite and spaniard Calderon getting some late attention from the media.

Rasheed Wallace is without doubt relieved to have not been chosen!

Doc Rivers, Pierce and Garnett logically represent the best NBA team for the east.

With such an abundance of talent the game should be great with an expected dynamic duel between Kobe and Lebron in the money time!

My next post will be tuesday the 19th of febuary with my Nokia cameraphone interviews from N'awlins!

George Eddy