A second-year WNBA All-Star voter says her ballot mirrored media and fan consensus—until it didn’t. She explains the biases she built into her rankings, where her choices differed from the announced starters, and what she learned about judgment, recognition, a
You know what time it is, WNBA fans.
The All-Star starters were announced Thursday, laying out where fans, players and media ranked the league’s top stars at the midpoint of the season. For many people, it’s a familiar cycle: indulge the sports reflexes, argue about what’s fair, and pick apart who was left out.
This year, the bigger question wasn’t “Who deserved it?” It was “What did I use to decide?”
The voter at the center of this confession is Alissa Hirsh of the Chicago Sun-Times ballot—a comparison she makes to describe her own approach. In her second year as an All-Star voter. she said the process can still feel imposing. but far enough along that she wants her choices to feel authentic. So she leaned into her biases instead of pretending she didn’t have any.
She laid out three of them.
First: she favored the best players from the top six teams, reasoning that players from the bottom nine had to clear an “extremely high bar.” Basketball is a team sport, she said, so she wanted team success rewarded.
Second: she prioritized efficient scorers. She said she treated high-volume scorers with low or mediocre shooting percentages with more suspicion, because she wanted to reward the elite group that scores at a high level and does it efficiently.
Third: she tried to represent as many teams as possible, within reason.
Then came the part that made the exercise real: the reveal of how her ballot differed from the actual starters.
For the All-Star guards, the starters announced were Paige Bueckers, Olivia Miles, Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell.
Her ballot had Paige Bueckers, Olivia Miles, Kelsey Plum and Rhyne Howard.
In the All-Star frontcourt, the starters announced were A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Jessica Shepard, Gabby Williams, Natasha Howard and Aliyah Boston.
Her ballot included A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Jessica Shepard, Gabby Williams, Natasha Howard and Angel Reese instead of Aliyah Boston. She said the rest were the same.
Overall, she said the framework helped her keep the process manageable and fun, and it kept her from straying too far from how the media, fans and players saw things.
But she also acknowledged it wasn’t perfect.
Leaving off Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston, she said, showed her bias toward the top teams was too strong. Even if their records weren’t as strong. she believed she should have made space for at least one of them—Clark for her court vision. Boston for her all-around impact—though she said she was “still not completely sure where.”.
She also later realized she had been using another bias without fully naming it: she was judging players against their own potential, not just against their peers.
Kelsey Plum stood out to her for that reason. She said Plum stuck out because she’s “putting together layers of her game” that have developed over years, and that she “looks like a player at or near the peak of her powers.” She said the pick was worth it and she didn’t regret it.
At the same time, she said she didn’t want to leave off deserving players who are having great seasons simply because she believes they can play even better.
What did she learn from all of it?
On the surface, she said becoming more aware of her biases should make her a better voter next year.
Deeper than that, she said the process helped her see different parts of herself more clearly. She described wanting to trust her intuition more, while still building analytical structures to fall back on. She pointed to the former point guard in her—valuing winning and efficiency—and to the developing journalist who wants the ballot to be representative and generous.
She also said that in holding great players to a standard of not just playing well, but playing up to their fullest potential, she was doing something she wrote about recently: applying pressure.
Then the confession turned to something less about rosters and more about what sports asks from us. She wrote that the tendency to bring pressure in place of sentiments that don’t come as naturally—recognition, appreciation, even love—is something sports can train us to practice.
At its best, she said, those are the things sports give us the opportunity to practice—and that we should take that opportunity more often.
WNBA All-Star starters WNBA voting Paige Bueckers Olivia Miles Caitlin Clark Kelsey Mitchell Kelsey Plum Rhyne Howard A'ja Wilson Breanna Stewart Jessica Shepard Gabby Williams Natasha Howard Aliyah Boston Angel Reese