I could have sworn the NBA’s 65-game rule for end-of-season awards was pro-player. But now I’m being told it was to “protect fans” and is “lunacy”? And now the NBA Players Association is calling it “arbitrary” and saying it needs to be “reformed or abolished”? I must have missed some kind of memo.
Cade Cunningham was having a potential MVP-level season when he unfortunately suffered a collapsed lung which will likely make him miss the end of the NBA regular season. Cunningham played 61 games before his injury, which will cause him to miss out on All-NBA teams, which is insane. Cunningham was so easily one of the best five players all season and marking this year down in the history books without his name all over it is terrible. All that is true.
The problem is that the 65-game rule is not arbitrary or lunacy or any of the adjectives affixed to it in the last week; it was and is necessary because NBA awards do not just go down in some dusty tome of league history. They have massive financial implications, ones that cannot be as arbitrary as they were before the rule. So while it certainly can’t stay the same, you can’t just abolish it unilaterally.
The NBA needs a new version of the 65-Game Rule
I supported the 65-game minimum for awards, as well as positionless All-NBA teams, when they were introduced before the 2023-24 season because I was uncomfortable with how arbitrary end-of-season awards voting was when it is a difference of hundreds of millions of dollars for some players. If you make an All-NBA team or win Defensive Player of the Year at certain points on your previous contract, you become eligible for a colossal salary spike on your next deal. Jaylen Brown, for example, signed the richest contract in NBA history at the time for $303 million because he had made the All-NBA Second Team the year prior. It was a seismic difference in his life, for his future and for his family.
Who decides who is worth such a titanic sum of money and who is not? Why, NBA media members, who of course have literally never caused any problems related to these awards or blown literally anything out of proportion once (sarcasm). There are, of course, no local biases that could influence this whatsoever (sarcasm), nor is there ever any controversy about if the system is rigged against certain players unfairly (sarcasm). None of that has ever happened, because the NBA, of course, had myriad checks and balances in place when there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the line (sarcasm).
The 65-game rule, along with positionless All-NBA teams, is a version of checks and balances that is profoundly necessary. When the committee determining a pay raise the GDP of a small island nation is people like me with about the same qualifications as a rooster to give someone a raise, we need significant restrictions in place to apply some sanity to this system.
Detractors of the rule, which apparently includes the NBA Players Association whose interests basically align with everyone I said above, will tell you that it was a rule intended to incentivize player participation in a load-management heavy league; in short, it was anti-player, pro-fan, dangling awards and their associated contracts as a reward for playing more basketball. My response: if it actually was that, then we are all just vindictive children rather than a billion-dollar sports and entertainment industry.
The 65-Game Rule is good for players — just not for Cunningham
I would argue the rule is profoundly pro-player. In this moment, it is anti-one-single-player: Cade Cunningham, but on balance protects aspiring superstars from the total-lunacy of saying that, say, a future Victor Wembanyama is more worth All-NBA in 51 games than Jalen Brunson would be in 77. The number itself is, though the NBA will never admit it, precisely based on the fact that reigning MVP Joel Embiid played 66 games the previous season. It validated a fairly contentious campaign, and Embiid was the patron saint of load management up until that point. If anything, the rule was designed with the NBAPA’s interests in mind.
I agree that some changes are needed. Adding a minutes clause to the rule is fine with me, to allow for star players who play absurd volume before getting injured to qualify. But to the NBAPA and outraged members of the media more broadly, I ask this: we changed the rules to make things more fair and even, and now that things are even, we are saying they aren’t fair. Had Cunningham played out the season, we probably wouldn’t have heard a peep about this — are we just going to change the rules every time an exception appears that we don’t like?
It sucks that Cunningham is going to miss All-NBA, but that is one of the stipulations to having checks and balances in a system that uses media members to hand out salary raises to superstar athletes (have I made that point clear enough?). Perhaps it is time to simply axe the connection between All-NBA and supermax contracts entirely. To me, far more players being eligible for the supermax would be fine; it is up to teams to give it to them, and they don’t have to. Heck, make every player in the league eligible for the supermax and just call it a day. Rework the cap, do what you need to do.
In short: as long as awards are tied to contracts, they will matter far more than they should. We could end all this strife if we just cut out the middleman and let awards be awards and contracts be contracts. I had to take all that seriously because to the people involved it is serious. But it should just be fun; your favorite player made All-NBA, “yay!” That’s where I’m trying to get us.