The NBA’s decision to slot Toronto Raptors forward Brandon Ingram into the 2026 All-Star Game as an injury replacement for Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry didn’t land with much public noise, but Zach Lowe thinks it should have. In a recent discussion, Lowe called the selection “borderline shocking,” arguing that Ingram wasn’t the most defensible choice for the spot Commissioner Adam Silver had to fill once Curry was ruled out.
Ingram’s replacement nod is real and official: Silver named him to take Curry’s place on the USA Stripes roster for the All-Star showcase at Intuit Dome in Inglewood on Sunday. Lowe’s critique, though, wasn’t about whether Ingram is an All-Star-caliber scorer in a vacuum, it was about the specific “replacement” logic. If the league was trying to honor the most impactful season, Lowe argued, the list of players with stronger cases was longer than people seemed to acknowledge.
Lowe rattled off names he would have chosen ahead of Ingram, starting with stars whose two-way influence or night-to-night floor-raising feels harder to dispute: James Harden, Julius Randle, and Bam Adebayo. From there he moved into the “minutes played” gray area, noting that injuries can complicate the calculus but still preferring the overall value profile of players such as Evan Mobley and Michael Porter Jr. He added Derrick White as the kind of player whose impact can survive cold shooting because his teams so consistently win his minutes, and he even floated a curveball: Kon Knueppel, a young name that, in Lowe’s framing, speaks less to résumé than to the idea that the replacement spot should reward what’s actually been helping teams win this season.
The larger point behind Lowe’s frustration is familiar in modern All-Star debates: what the honor is supposed to represent when a replacement is needed. Is it a direct positional swap? A nod to the “next man up” by season value? A recognition of team success? Or simply a way to get another marketable name onto the weekend stage? Ingram is now in, officially, but Lowe’s pushback underscores how messy the league’s criteria can look the moment a marquee starter like Curry goes down and the replacement choice becomes a referendum on everyone left outside the velvet rope.
