The 2018 NBA All Star is next week and as expected, the format under which the game will be played has been changed YET AGAIN. Instead of a classic Eastern Conference vs Western Conference showdown, this year the two top vote getting players in each conference were named Team Captains. Unsurprisingly, Lebron James led the voting in the East and Stephen Curry took the West. As a result, this year we now have Team Lebron vs Team Stephe
n highlighting NBA All-Star Weekend in just a few days.
After being announced as Captains, Lebron and Steph were then able to draft their team’s starters based on a pool of players decided upon by fans, NBA players and media without any consideration for which conference those players played in. The reserve players for the two teams were chosen by their two respective coaches, with Mike D’Antoni coaching Team Steph and Dwane Casey coaching Team Lebron. Here’s the starters for each of the two teams:
Team Lebron
Team Stephen
Lebron James
Lebron James
We decided that it wouldn’t quite be an All-Star Game without us making a bold prediction. We turned to the historical sales data of each player’s rookie card. To keep things fair, we used the highest completed sales data available on COMC of each player’s Topps Chrome Refractor RC or Panini Prizm Silver Prizm RC, when available. In the event that the player didn’t have a rookie card in either of those sets, we defaulted to the player’s best available rookie autograph from a comparable set. As expected, the result was fun but not quite perfect, as some historical sales data was rather old due to the scarcity of the cards and did not accurately reflect the card’s current market value.
Team Lebron
Total Team Value = $1380.56
Team Stephen
Total Team Value = $1525.10
There you have it! On the backs of the silver prizm rookie cards of The Greek Freak and The Process, Team Steph bests Team Lebron by nearly $145, making Steph & Co. our pick to win the 2018 NBA All Star Game. Despite our Super Bowl prediction not going so well a couple weeks ago, we have faith that our highly in depth analysis of the 2018 NBA All-Star Game Starters will prove us right!
NBA All-Star Weekend kicks off February 16th at 9pm EST with the Rising Stars Game . All-Star Saturday Night (Skills Challenge, Three-Point Contest and Slam Dunk Contest) will be held February 17th at 8pm EST) and capping off the weekend will be the Team Lebron vs Team Stephen All-Star Game on February 19th at 7pm EST).
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