Damian Lillard’s talent has made him a star, but he’s lacking the type of commercial presence that might have made him an All-Star. Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

I’m not exactly sure who started it. I know that Marc Spears of Yahoo Sports introduced the idea of Damian Lillard as a possible All-Star last month. I know that some people took up the cause and ran with it, so much so that Damian was asked about the potential of being an All-Star reserve after a couple of games last month, and that after the All-Star reserves were announced and Damian wasn’t among them some other people called snub.

Let me go on the record with this: Damian Lillard is not an All-Star this year. He will be at some point; he just isn’t right now.

But just because Dame’s non-selection isn’t a snub doesn’t mean Portland’s potential Rookie of the Year doesn’t warrant consideration. And because of that consideration, it’s important to talk about what exactly makes one an All-Star, and why some NBA players have been asked to participate in All-Star festivities in their first season as a pro and others haven’t.

Before we go into all that, though, it’s necessary to illuminate what the All-Star Game is really all about.

In classic Wikipedia fashion, the NBA All-Star Game is described as “An exhibition game hosted annually by the National Basketball Association, matching the league’s star players from the Eastern Conference against their counterparts from the Western Conference. It’s the featured event of All-Star Weekend.”

All-Star Weekend is much more than just a vehicle for the All-Star Game, which in turn is much more than a meaningless exhibition game. All-Star Weekend is about putting together a promotional package for the league as a whole at a time when the eyeballs of the American sports fan are exceedingly vulnerable.

The NFL and Major League Baseball are the two most popular professional leagues in the United States. Summer and fall belong to the MLB. Fall and winter is the domain of the National Football League. As one is winding down, the other is getting ready to start. The Super Bowl was two weeks ago; pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training this week.

Sandwiched between the NFL and the MLB is the NBA. Its fan base, as far as it really matters, is pretty niche. Diehards keep the thing on its feet at all. That doesn’t mean David Stern and his crowd want to give up on the millions, or even billions, of dollars that are up for grabs on television deals, season tickets, and merchandise, though. Expansion is the name of the game. Getting people in the fly-over states (places where there are no professional basketball teams) to care about the NBA, and show that they care by ordering a premium cable package or another Kobe Bryant jersey, is the prime directive of the office of the commissioner.

Enter All-Star Weekend and its marquee event the All-Star Game.

Sure it’s good clean fun watching all the best players in the NBA on the court at the same time. Sometimes, even, the All-Star Game has an impact on basketball culture (the 1992 All-Star Game for instance). But more than anything, the game itself and the affiliated events serve as an advertisement for the league.

So does that mean that I think the All-Star Game is without significance, or worse a fraud? Not at all. I think the exact opposite, in fact. The All-Star Game is one of the more important things that takes place in any given NBA season, and it needs to be great every year.

Casual fans have trouble staying hooked on the NBA for the 82 games each team has to play, but a rousing mid-season game featuring all the marquee players in the league can pique the interest of some who might not have tuned in back in November or December while sustaining the interest of those few couple-times-a-month fans who might have been leaning towards bowing out in early February when the narratives get thick and indecipherable and some of the play starts to slow down in the long preparation for the stretch run. A lackluster All-Star Game does not accomplish those very important ends.

We all know that the fans select the 10 guys who start the All-Star Game. The criteria for how non-starters get selected are a little less cut and dry. Sometimes one outlier type season is good enough to get asked. Sometimes it’s a collection of good seasons building to a better or a really good season that gets a guy in. Sometimes it’s getting the ever popular brand-tag of “the next big thing.”

And it’s “the next big things” that often get invited to the All-Star Game as rookies. When you’ve got a guy who from day one is primed to be a superstar, you don’t hold out on the people, especially if you want that guy to help you sell stuff on TV.

The last three rookies to play in the All-Star Game were (in reverse chronological order for oldest to most recent) Tim Duncan, Yao Ming, and Blake Griffin. Apart from being frontcourt players, these three guys have a lot in common.

Tim Duncan entered the league in 1997, had an immediate impact, and very easily lived up to the hype that came with him from Wake Forest. The Big Fundamental has always been those two things, big and fundamentally sound. He might not ever sell the most jerseys, but he was a big deal player from the day he showed up. He was a talent that needed to be recognized, spoon-fed to the masses if it had to come to that.

Yao Ming is the most interesting case among this group of three, and might go the furthest to emphasize the importance of branding with regards to the All-Star Game. By no means did Yao blow people away in his rookie season. He succeeded, there’s no doubt about that, but his impact on the court didn’t outpace his importance off the court, at least not right away. But that off the court stuff was much, much more important any way. And it’s what got him into the All-Star Game.

China is the golden goose. Not just of the NBA, but for all American enterprises that want to continue thriving and printing money for the next century. There was absolutely no better way to sell the NBA to China that through a player like Yao Ming. Ballots for the 2003 All-Star Game were the first to be available in Chinese. With the backing of Chinese fans, Yao was voted an All-Star starter, netting about 250,000 more votes than Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq was on a three-year run of being the MVP of the NBA Finals at the time.

Yao played 17 minutes in his first All-Star Game, and scored two points. He didn’t light the world on fire, but he was there, and the Chinese NBA fans were part of the All-Star Game equation from 2003 on. Yao started the All-Star Game eight times from 2002 until his retirement in 2011. The in-roads the NBA has made in China, with Chinese fans, and with Asian Americans because of Yao Ming cannot be overstated.

The most recent rookie to be selected to the All-Star Game has had the same type of impact as Yao Ming. But where Yao represented international expansion, Blake Griffin is the poster-child of the new NBA. Griffin is big, strong, fast, and marketable. He’s smart, good looking, non-threatening, and self aware enough to laugh at himself.

Griffin’s appeared in mainstream car advertisements, in weird end-of-the dial ads for super niche products like Game Fly, and on viral videos and podcasts for companies like Earwolf and Funny or Die that are right at the bulls-eye of the zeitgeist.

Blake Griffin’s dunks have made him one of the most marketable players in the NBA. Credit: Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

It can be argued the Blake Griffin’s branding extravaganza began in the moment of super-synergy when he won the Slam Dunk Contest by leaping over the hood of a Kia, but in my mind it was the inclusion in the actual All-Star Game (held in LA the town where Blake happens to play his home games) that gave Griffin the legitimacy to be a massively marketable player and not just a one-trick pony.

Which brings us to Damian Lillard. Where does he fit in the conversation of game-changing rookies, and does he bring the kind of stuff to the table that put those aforementioned guys (not to mention the likes of Grant Hill, Shaq, Dikembe Mutombo, David Robinson, and Michael Jordan) into the All-Star Game?

So far in 2012-13, Lillard leads rookies in total minutes played, minutes per game, total assists, assists per game, and points per game. He’s also fourth in the league in minutes played, tied for 18^th in field goals, 12^th in field goal attempts, tied for ninth in three-point field goals, tied for fourth in three-pointers attempted, 10^th in total assists, 15^th in points, fifth in minutes per game, 18^th in points per game, and 14^th in assists per game. Those are All-Star type numbers. In fact, there are a couple statistical categories (minutes per game, minutes played, and field goal attempts) where all or almost all of the guys ahead of Damian are All-Stars, some of them starters.

Where Damian is lacking, though, and what may or may not have kept him out of the All-Star Game, is branding. Dame’s narrative is strong, he comes from a small college, wasn’t recruited much out of high school, and grew up in Oakland, but he lacks the kind of image that makes Blake Griffin Blake Griffin or the international cachet of a Yao Ming.

Portland understands what they have, and are taking advantage of it. But only those in the local market get to experience the cross-platform marketing at play when in-stadium PA announcer Mark Mason introduces Damian Lillard as wearing the letter “O” and not the number zero. (Here’s a hint, it’s tied directly to a local-area commercial for games on Comcast in which Damian explains he decided on zero to represent the fact that he came from Oakland, went to college in Ogden, and currently resides/plays his basketball in Oregon.)

There’s a marketable commodity in Damian Lillard, but the NBA hasn’t gotten wise to it yet.

But what does Lillard think about all this? The hoopla, the branding strategy, the future of the Portland Trail Blazers? He is complicit in everything after all; nobody can be drafted into a marketing scheme against his will.

“It’s a compliment to me but I got to pay my dues just like everybody else,” Lillard told me after a recent game when I asked him how he felt about getting brought up as a potential All-Star. “I got to keep getting better. I think down the line that stuff will come for me, but right now I got to keep helping the team win.”

When I brought up to Damian the sometimes-salient facts that Portland plays half of its games in the Pacific Northwest, hardly ever gets on national TV, and isn’t one of the top franchises in the NBA, and because of those things some of the more marketable elements of his game are lost on the less discerning professional basketball fans, this is how he responded:

“We’re an NBA team. We might not be the Lakers are the Knicks, but we’re an NBA team,” Lillard said. “We have an All-Star on our team, so it’s not like people don’t know what we’re doing or don’t know how I play or what I’m doing on the floor.”

I re-framed my line of questioning a little bit after it had been announced the Lillard would be competing in the Skills Challenge, an event that would put him center-stage all by himself and up against some of the NBA’s top talent at the point guard position. But he didn’t imagine that this event and his inclusion in it would do much to raise his profile.

“I don’t think it will do a lot, I just think it will allow people to see me participating in some type of competition,” he explained. “It’s a precise type of challenge so they’ll get to see my ability to do things like that.”

He does admit, though, that the more he plays and the more heads he turns, the more basketball fans across the country are coming to know him.

“I think a lot more people are starting to me familiar with my story, where I come from. I think people can appreciate it because there are a lot of people that have been in my position that didn’t get the opportunity to play in this league,” Lillard told me. “There are a lot of people that are in my position right now as far as coming from a small school and growing in a tough neighborhood. I think it’s being recognized because it gives people hope.”

There’s certainly an opportunity here to be capitalized on, it’s just not immediately obvious what the best course of action is going to be. Maybe the NBA will build Damian Lillard’s branding around Dame being an ambassador for small college players. Maybe it will be built around his preternatural leadership skills and knack for operating calmly under extreme pressure. Or maybe it will be constructed around Lillard’s very apparent ability to never be flapped. (That’s my attempt at a play on the word unflappable, probably the most apt descriptor I can come up with for Damian Lillard.)

However they choose to do it, there’s plenty of branding for the NBA to be built around Damian Lillard. Maybe not enough to make him the first backcourt rookie to make the All-Star Game since Michael Jordan, but the list of guys not selected to the All-Star Game in their rookie year includes both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, two of the most marketable young players in the NBA and two guys with highly successful marketing campaigns that tie the league to international brands like Nike and Pepsi.

All-Star Game or no, there’s a chance a similar kind of marketing campaign and branding strategy will be in Damian Lillard’s future.

@mikeacker | @ripcityproject | mike.acker1@gmail.com

The All-Star Game is the place where the NBA does the best it can to sell itself to the masses. Credit: Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports

Major complaints are usually along the lines, “Man, people are stupid” and, “That’s just because he has an entire country voting for him.” Players, often those who might get left out of the game, have voiced their complaints over the years, as have coaches, owners and anyone that’s a part of the media collective. People that are supposed to know better than the largely undefined casual fan. Whether or not most of these people have side agendas or not, they tend to have a point. History is huge and when performance is not properly rewarded, history, at least conversational history, can get murky.

Supporters of the process, which allows anyone anywhere to vote from a pre-selected pool of players up to one time per day, say that the people should get what they want, whether it’s deemed the correct decision or not. This is what the NBA thinks, too, since the system remains intact just as David Stern’s regime does the same. It’s a business model geared toward drawing in the most interest, the most dollars and to sustaining world-wide growth for the league. For anyone that makes a dime off basketball, that can be a conversation stopper, even among the same people listing the various flaws.

I lean toward the side of keeping things the way they are. More people than not are probably getting what they like without being force fed like it was a Disney product. The media has a role in this as well, giving more words and airtime to players like McGrady and Iverson because those are name brands. The ratings say the people want it, so the people get it, same with the votes. It’s an odd symbiotic cycle, but it works. And it’s much better than handing the voting system over to an invisible panel of sports-writers, broadcasters, coaches or players, removing fan input in favor of folks who are often just as unaccountable and biased as the people they blame now (how about an open ballot for all NBA panel voting?). But the system isn’t perfect, and rather than lament it’s failures let’s try to figure out how to make it better. That starts with trusting the fans to think.

1. Remove all names and positions from the ballots

Right now there are two main ways to vote: online and with paper akin to an SAT scoresheet. You select, from a group chosen based on prior performance, five players per conference: two guards, two forwards and a center. It can all take less than a minute to do. It’s about as difficult as walking down the aisle in the grocery store and choosing from 10 different flavors of chips.

Why is this good? If All-Star selections are important enough that we give weight to them when considering a player’s career, why should it be so easy? Of course many people will elect to go with the familiar names staring them right in the face. Half of their work is already done for them. All that’s left is the simple arithmetic at the end of a complicated equation. Think about how much quicker it is to get a group to decide on dinner options when you present them with three familiar choices rather than the broad, “What should we eat?” All it takes is one person to say that one option sounds good and the process is simplified.

If we care enough about doing right by the players, why not ask people to consider their decision a little more? Take the names off the ballot and just leave five write-in slots to fill either online or in paper. If it’s in paper, just print clearly that anything that’s not legible is not accepted. Yes this creates a large number of ballots for the league to digest — which we’ll get to later — but they should be moving away from paper voting anyways. Online, you just create a system where once a person starts typing in a name, matches come up just like in your internet search bar. You will still get people who type in the first popular names that come to mind, but it’s a little easier to digest curious autonomous choices than nearly automated responses.

Secondly, you removed all positional restrictions. If it’s the people’s choice, and the people choose a five-guard starting lineup, so be it. You can fill in positions from there, avoiding Jamaal Magloire situations in the process.

2. Voting doesn’t begin until December 20

As things are right now, voting begins two or three weeks into November, which is also two or three weeks since the first game of the season. That’s insane. You can’t go about selecting All-Stars like you would potential dates after ten rounds of five-minute speed dating. Hardly any teams have even been on national television by then. Let the season mature and give people something to look back on.

Personally, I’d like a three-week voting period beginning January 1st, but in the interest of the league health angle, Dec. 20 gets all the holiday festivities involved. The country makes some of it’s most important decisions on ballots that are open for less than a day, so I’d like to think everyone can find the time to get their selections in during three weeks.

One flaw with this move is that it gives people less time to complain about other people with the staggered releases of voting results. You also don’t get Steve Nash making the late comeback to start over McGrady. Since the league probably enjoys stirring up controversy and interest with these results in the same way it thrives on trade rumors and conspiracy theories, you can keep the discussions going by opening up polling early in November so you can still track how guys are doing. Then, once the official ballot opens, you have a sense for how other people are voting. Hey, just like our current political system.

3. You get one ballot

Does it make sense to give more power to the folks that have the most time to spend voting? Of course not. If you only get one chance to get things right, you are going to take a little more time with it. This way we avoid people voting every time they see a player on a  highlight reel.

4. Add a rule excluding players based on minutes played

This is by far the easiest to implement and also one of the older suggestions in the book. If your minutes played in the All-Star Game has any chance of being within 200 percent of your total minutes on the season, you’re out. Some people claim that it’s tyrannical to make others work within a specific rule set, but guess what, basketball has rules and it’s doing pretty well.

5. Let fans vote on everything in All-Star Weekend

The dunk-in during the Rookie Challenge is a step in the right direction since the winner will be voted on via text messages and on NBA.com, but let’s take it even further. Since we are removing the two-month long ballot process, give the fans more to vote on during the voting period.

So, reserve one spot in every contest for the fan vote, including the Dunk Contest, 3-pt Shootout, Skills Challenge and H.O.R.S.E. We can ignore the Shooting Star Challenge or whatever that’s called this year because nobody cares about it. Again, don’t make people choose from a pool, just let them write in who they want to see in that challenge. The problem you run into here is players getting voted into challenges they really aren’t suited for, like Chris Paul in the Dunk Contest or Dwight Howard in the 3-pt Contest. In that case, the players have full right to decline the spot and give it to the next person on the list, even if all they do is vote in LeBron James every season.

It’s not a perfect process and you might get some pretty screwy results sometimes, but the league still has plenty of spots to fill of it’s own choosing. And again, you are giving the fans what they want, only asking them to put a little thought into their decisions.

Will we ever see any of these changes. Maybe some, but almost definitely not all. The NBA loves giving people things to discuss and debate because that just means they are talking about the league. And unless the topic is performance enhancers or drugs or guns or gambling, the league isn’t getting hurt by one poor vote every year or so. Guys like Deron Williams and Carmelo Anthony might get jobbed out of an All-Star spot every so often, but in time they all get their due. With hoops writing as good and comprehensive as it ever was, with more reference materials being put out every day than you would get in entire seasons thirty years ago, do people even use All-Star appearances when debating a player’s worth and talent? We can damn the people all we want for their decisions, but how much of a decision is it if you aren’t asking them to think?