David Lee is averaging 20 points, 12 boards and 3 assists per game. He shoots 56|PERCENT| from the field and 79|PERCENT| from the line. He wasn't chosen to be on the All Star team this year...should he have been?
Based on his traditional stats, the answer is obviously yes. But traditionally "All Star" goes well beyond just box score numbers. Lee plays for a team that is well under .500...18 - 27, to be exact. All of the other Eastern All Stars come from teams that are over .500, so the argument can be made that Lee can't be THAT much of an All Star if his team is so poor.
The thing is, though, in this day and age we have plenty of tools to measure a player's impact besides just box score stats and team win-loss. Efficiency has been shown to be a factor of good basketball, and box score-based advanced stats like PER, Wins Produced or Win Shares take that efficiency into account. Likewise, the family of +/- stats give us quantifiable ways to gauge a player's contribution to winning.
As you might have guessed from the box score stats and shooting percentages, Lee measures out well in the efficiency/box score based stats (top-20 in the NBA in PER, Wins Produced, Win Shares). But 82games.com tells us that Lee has a +/- of -2.3/48 minutes. That could be because the Knicks are bad, but his on-court/off-court +/- of only +1.2 tells us that the Knics aren't that much worse when he's off the court than when he's on the court. In other words, even if the team sucks, if Lee were a huge impact player like his box score stats suggest, the team should suck a lot worse when he's not there. But it doesn't. Third, and most damningly, the team IS a lot worse when Lee's teammates Danilo Gallinari (net +6.7), Jordan Hill (net +6.1), and Jared Jeffries (net +5.7) aren't on the court. These are all players that play similar positions to Lee, so it doesn't look good for their +/- numbers to be better than their "All Star" teammate.
If Lee would have been chosen to the All Star team I certainly wouldn't have argued, as his box score (and fantasy) numbers look great. But he's on a bad team, and the advanced stats suggest that his impact isn't really enough to help stem the tide the way a no-doubt All Star would. As such, I can't find much outrage that he was "snubbed" from the team.