Thursday Night - Star Reserve Picks - Espn - All

It will be recorded as one of the biggest differences between the lockout-shortened season of 1999 and the lockout-shortened season of 2011-12.

There wasn't enough time for a midseason classic in the 50-game scramble of '99. All-Star Weekend was canceled.

A lucky 13 years later? When TNT's Ernie Johnson announced the East and West starters to the nation Thursday night for the All-Star Game to be staged in Orlando on Feb. 26, none of the league's 30 teams had yet played its 25th game.

It's way early, in other words, for us to be feuding over All-Star nominations, but it's also too late to protest. As ragged as things were in a harried January with teams averaging 94.2 points per game in the NBA's lowest scoring month since a reading of 94.1 ppg in March 2004 coaches have received their annual email outlining the guidelines for choosing seven reserves in their respective conferences.

2012 ALL-STAR INDEX

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And their ballots are due back to the league, without voting for any of their own players, next week, so the reserves can be announced Thursday night . Each ballot must include two forwards, two guards, one center and two wild-card selections, with those picks ranked from one to seven to give each vote a point value for tiebreaking purposes. The coaches, though, are also invited to ignore the listings on the actual All-Star ballot if they feel a player can play multiple positions, allowing them to be creative with how they fill their seven slots as opposed to, say, forcing the selection of a backup center who might not have unquestioned All-Star credentials.

The starters in the West, as announced Thursday night , are Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin at forward, Andrew Bynum at center and Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant at guard. The East's starters are LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony at forward, Derrick Rose at guard.

Using the instructions outlined above, here's how ESPN.com's benches would look:

Eastern Conference reserves

Forwards: Josh Smith (Atlanta), (Chicago)

I swear: It's not the lefty thing with Smith. It's the combination of his all-around game and visions of how good he'd be flying around in an All-Star setting that made me want to take Josh over Joe Johnson as the Hawk to reward for Atlanta's ability (so far) to withstand the loss of All-Star center Al Horford .

Western Conference reserves