Unserious and embarrassing.

Those are the two words that came to mind when the NBA announced its Western Conference All-Star reserves on Sunday evening, revealing that the Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James was on the team while the LA Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard wasn’t.

I’ve been tracking egregiously bad All-Star selections as sort of a side hobby, so I can confidently say that, if this was the will of the Western Conference coaches, it was the most bizarre and indefensible selection of my adult life (a period which covers a greater number of years than I would like to admit).

Given Leonard’s omission amid the league’s ongoing investigation into the Clippers and former team sponsor Aspiration, and given the identity of the player selected in his place, conspiracy theorists are likely to have a field day with this as well. However, I suspect the West coaches made the horrific decision on their own, one that leaves the league in a bizarre situation of deflecting those conspiracy theories for the next two weeks.

Let’s start by taking the results at face value: Yes, this is the worst reserve choice of the century. Maybe it’s a fitting final salvo for the classic All-Star Game in general. Maybe it’s so unserious that the coaches selected James over Leonard and everyone shrugged. (Making it more hilarious, James bailed on the game at the last minute last year after it was too late to select a replacement.)

By rule, the 15 West head coaches submit votes for the conference’s reserves and may not vote for players from their own team. However, there is no enforceable rule requiring them to take the process seriously or preventing them from outsourcing the job to a communications staffer or an intern.

The issue isn’t just that James made it and Leonard didn’t; it’s the simultaneous juxtaposition of these things.

Leonard has been so good this season that he should have been the first or second name atop every ballot. He’s having an All-NBA-caliber season while dragging a woefully thin Clippers roster from the depths of the West standings back into the postseason race. Leonard ranks sixth in the NBA in PER and sixth in BPM. Every player ahead of him on both lists was voted in as a starter. For good measure, he’s leading the league in steals and, through Saturday, was percentage points away from joining the 50-40-90 club (49.6 percent from the floor, 39.5 percent from 3, 93.6 percent from the line). Given the injuries to some other elite players, Leonard has arguably been the third-most valuable player in the entire conference through the end of January, even with the 13 games he’s missed.

So it wasn’t just that James made it over Leonard, it’s that James, Devin Booker, Deni Avdija and Jamal Murray all made it over Leonard.

Similarly, it wasn’t just that James made the All-Star team, but that he made it ahead of Leonard and Alperen Şengün and Julius Randle and James Harden and Rudy Gobert and countless others in the loaded West whose performance clearly betters James’ in both production and availability.

An All-Star for the 22nd time, James is unquestionably one of the three greatest players ever, and he probably ain’t third. Even at 41, he remains remarkably effective, averaging 21.9 points and 6.6 assists per game on 50.2 percent shooting entering Sunday. That said, “amazing for 41” is a very different standard from “top-12 player in the Western Conference,” and he falls short of that bar.

James’ efficiency stats pale next to most of the other All-Star candidates in the conference, and in addition, he had only played 992 minutes through Saturday. It’s not like he’s been missed, either: The Lakers have a better record when he doesn’t play and have only been 1.7 points per 100 possessions better in his minutes, despite nearly two-thirds of them coming with Luka Dončić.

If it was the genuine intent of the West coaches to leave Leonard off the team and put James on it, I think it is important to note that this is not one head-scratching decision, but two. I never want to hear any of the 13 coaches who were eligible to vote Leonard over James complain about any All-Star selection vote ever again.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about that process.

Coaches are instructed to vote for the seven best players regardless of position, in ranked order from No. 1 through No. 7. The coaches submit their votes electronically into a system managed by the accounting firm Ernst & Young, and the league technically doesn’t even see the ballots until after results are tabulated.

Ernst & Young tallies the votes using a points system. The top two players on the ballot get five points, the next two on the list get four points, and the last three get three points, two points and one point, respectively. The seven players with the most total points are the All-Star reserves, and there is a tiebreak procedure if necessary.

While many people are going to imagine commissioner Adam Silver somehow using a magic button in his fortified castle at NBA HQ to circumvent that process, it seems hugely unlikely in reality. A more plausible explanation, given how coaches tend to vote, is that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for two Clippers because of their record (23-25 entering Monday), and the coaches split their votes between Leonard and Harden in such a way that neither made it.

However, by virtue of Leonard’s absence, we now have an absolutely delicious possibility ahead of us. The league will have to select at least one injury replacement for the All-Star team (for the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo) and possibly more. Because of the new format for the All-Star Game this year (the “game” is actually a round-robin tournament featuring two U.S. teams and one World team), the league has not yet committed to a process for selecting injury replacements. No decision has been announced on whether an Eastern Conference player must be replaced by another Eastern Conference player, or if an international player must be replaced by another international player, or if it’s just anything goes.

We could very well end up in a situation where Silver himself must choose whether to select Leonard … or not select him … for the event that’ll take place in the Clippers’ home arena. Awwwwwkward.

That potential decision adds a final bit of spice to the All-Star Game as everyone awaits a resolution to the league’s ongoing investigation. And it was all set up by the most egregiously bad All-Star reserve vote in memory.