Confessions of a WNBA All-Star voter

You know what time it is, WNBA fans.

The starters for the All-Star Game were announced Thursday, revealing where fans, players and media ranked the top stars at the midpoint of the season.

That means everyone gets to indulge their favorite All-Star reactions.

Pointing out snubs. Stirring the pot on evolving beefs. Exposing fools. Decrying injustice.

Or maybe, instead of signing up for another round of social-media jousting, you rather would stretch your introspective muscles.

All-Star debates can be a great opportunity to reflect on ourselves.

This was my second year as an All-Star voter. I’m still new enough to the process that it can feel imposing, but I’m far enough in to want the ballot to feel authentic. Like a true Alissa Hirsh of the Sun-Times ballot, not just a random media member trying to sound smart.

So I decided to lean into my biases.

These were the ones I used:

Hirsh Bias No. 1: The best players from the top six teams were favored. Players from the bottom nine had to clear an extremely high bar. Basketball is a team sport, so team success should matter.

Hirsh Bias No. 2: Efficient scorers were favored. High-volume scorers with low or mediocre shooting percentages were treated with more suspicion. All the best scorers in the ‘‘W’’ can put points on the board. I wanted to reward the elite group that does it efficiently.

Hirsh Bias No. 3: Try to represent as many teams as possible. The top teams are really good this year, so I wanted my ballot to reflect that.

Now, for the reveal of where my ballot differed from the actual starters.

The All-Star guards are Paige Bueckers, Olivia Miles, Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell.

I had Bueckers, Miles, Kelsey Plum and Rhyne Howard.

The All-Star frontcourt starters are A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Jessica Shepard, Gabby Williams, Natasha Howard and Aliyah Boston.

I had Angel Reese instead of Boston. The rest were the same.

Overall, I think my biases served me well. They kept the process simple and fun. And I didn’t stray too far from how the media, fans and players saw things.

But they weren’t perfect. Like all biases, I think they narrowed my focus at the expense of larger truths.

Leaving off Clark and Boston, in particular, showed my bias toward winning teams was too strong. Despite the Fever’s mediocre record, I should have found space for at least one of them — Clark for her court vision, Boston for her all-around impact — though I’m still not completely sure where.

I also realized later that I had been using another bias without fully recognizing it: I was judging players against their own potential, not just against their peers.

Plum stuck out to me in part because she is putting together layers of her game that have developed over years. She looks like a player at or near the peak of her powers.

That is worth celebrating. I don’t regret the pick.

But I also don’t want to leave off deserving players who are having great seasons simply because they are not playing the best basketball of their careers.

So what did I learn from all of this?

On the surface, being more aware of my biases should make me a better voter next year. On a deeper level, the process also helped me see different parts of myself more clearly.

I can see myself wanting to trust my intuition more but still building analytical structures to fall back on.

I also can see that, in holding great players to the standard of not just playing well but playing up to their fullest potential, I was doing something I wrote about recently: applying pressure.

There it was again, the tendency to bring pressure in place of sentiments that don’t come as naturally but are actually what I’m looking for:

Recognition. Appreciation. Even love.

At its best, those are the things sports give us the opportunity to practice.

We should take that opportunity more often.