Angel Reese said it was disrespectful that no Atlanta Dream players were named WNBA All-Star Game starters on Thursday, even though her team is tied atop the Eastern Conference at 12-8. Reese, in her first season with the Dream, said the omission of Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray was hard to accept after the league's weighted voting process left Atlanta without a starter.
The starters are determined by a formula that gives fan votes 50 percent of the result, with player votes and selected media votes at 25 percent each. That split mattered here. Howard was in the top four in both media and player voting but finished ninth in fan voting, while Gray placed seventh with fans, sixth with players and eighth with media. Reese ranked sixth across the board, which was enough to keep her in the conversation but not enough to change the outcome for Atlanta.
Reese spoke with the kind of edge that comes from knowing the numbers do not always match the moment. She leads the league with 11.6 rebounds per game, and Howard leads with 2.5 steals per game while ranking second with 3.2 3-pointers per game, yet neither earned a starter spot. Reese said she had not said much in the media this year because it has been tough for her over the last two seasons, but she felt it was important to speak for teammates who do not always speak for themselves. Her point was simple: the Dream's success runs through Howard and Gray, and the voting did not reflect that.
The split also exposed how much the fan vote can overpower stronger showings from players and media. Howard and Gray each have been All-Stars three times, and the Dream backcourt pair came in as the fifth- and sixth-highest voting scores among guards, just short of the cut. Reese was the first big out, ranking seventh among frontcourt players, while the rest of the starters at guard and frontcourt went to Olivia Miles, Paige Bueckers, Kelsey Mitchell, Caitlin Clark, Breanna Stewart, Jessica Shepard, A’ja Wilson, Aliyah Boston, Gabby Williams and Natasha Howard. For Atlanta, the message from Thursday was not that its best players were ignored in every ballot. It was that none of the ballots lined up enough to put one of them in the starting five.
That is why Reese called it a slap in the face. The Dream are winning, their stars are producing, and the weighted formula still pushed them outside the starters. Unless the league changes how much weight it gives to fans, the same kind of result can happen again: a team near the top of the standings can leave the announcement with no starter at all.
