* * *

All-Star voting begins next week. Who should NBA fans be rooting for to win Team Captain spots?

* * *

Steve Aschburner: Please, please, please let the top vote-getters in each conference be Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid and Golden State’s Draymond Green. Those two would give us a real show when they picked their teams playground-style. The choices would be intriguing but the commentary would be even better, with a couple of guys in charge who are quite willing to let it fly verbally about anyone or anything. If we’re going to make this a televised event, let’s go full “WWE heel” with it. Stoke a rivalry, not just for the All-Star Game but for various meetings that follow, all the way into spring.

Shaun Powell: Keep in mind that this will now be A Big Thing because it’ll be turned into a made-for-TV event. With that, LeBron James in the West and Joel Embiid in the East would be good for laughs. Oh well, we’ll probably get Kawhi instead.

John Schuhmann: Because the All-Star draft is going to be televised this year, and for the sake of entertainment value, we should all be rooting for Joel Embiid and LeBron James. Stephen Curry wouldn’t be a terrible alternative to James, and there’s potential for a fun back-and-forth if it were James and Kyrie Irving. Klay Thompson’s humor would keep it interesting, but he doesn’t have much of a shot at being the No. 1 vote-getter in the West.

Sekou Smith: If we wanted to see NBA Twitter explode with the Petty Olympics, we’d get Kevin Durant on one side and Joel Embiid on the other. Talk about pure entertainment … I’d sign up for that right now. And I think the fans would love every single troll-filled second of that All-Star draft. That said, a LeBron James-Kawhi Leonard matchup is probably a much more realistic probability. And that’s fine. We’d certainly eliminate some of the emotion of the process with Kawhi doing his best to eliminate the drama.