Nikola Jokić’s hyperextended knee all but eliminated him from the MVP race. That would be true in any rational world. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was neck-and-neck with him already. If two players are reasonably close but one misses a month or more due to injury, the other would and should win. We really didn’t need a rule to tell us that.
And yet we have one. In 2023, the NBA instituted a 65-game minimum to qualify for major, end-of-season awards. While Jokić’s injury almost certainly would have eliminated him from contention anyway, the fact that it’s projected to take him essentially just beyond the eligibility threshold has drawn quite a bit of attention to a rule that doesn’t really accomplish anything. History already tells us that players facing lengthy absences rarely win awards.
Only five players have ever won MVPs having played fewer than 65 games. Four of them did so in seasons that included less than 82 games: 1999 Karl Malone played 49 out of 50 games, 2012 LeBron James played 62 out of 66, 2020 Giannis Antetokounmpo played 63 out 73 and 1958 Bob Cousy played 64 out of 72. The only true MVP that wouldn’t have qualified for the 65-game rule was Bill Walton in 1978. He won playing 58 games. On the night he got hurt, his Portland Trail Blazers were 50-10 and among the greatest regular-season teams of all time to that point. He was a reasonable exception to a rule we assumed voters could be trusted to leave unspoken.
Rudy Gobert winning Defensive Player of the Year with 56 games played in 2018 is a tad suspect, but that award has otherwise been reasonably unaffected. True, Kawhi Leonard and Jaren Jackson both won below 65 games, but neither did so egregiously. Leonard played 64 in 2015, including the last 41 straight. Jackson played 63, and it would have been 64 if Memphis had needed him for the season finale. Brandon Roy and Patrick Ewing are the only Rookie of the Year winners below 65 games in an 82-game season, so again, uncommon.
There’s one, specific area in which this 65-game minimum actually does matter: All-NBA. The 2011-12 season was shortened due to a lockout. We had nine 82-game seasons after that before the 65-game minimum was instituted. During that stretch, 135 total All-NBA slots were awarded. Of those 135 slots, 18, or a bit more than 13%, went to players who played in less than 65 games. Notably, half of those All-NBA nods were awarded in the last two seasons before the change. Four came in the 2021-22 season and five came in the 2022-23 season. A year after that, the minimum was instituted.
There are some pretty notable points about the window we just covered. The 2012-13 season broadly aligns with the introduction of “load management” as a term in the NBA zeitgeist. The concept was first widely debated when Gregg Popovich sent four starters home before a November 2012 game against the Miami Heat that was nationally televised for the sake of rest. Ostensibly, the 65-game rule was a measure taken to limit load management. In theory, the NBA wanted a deterrent against players missing games due to rest.
There was also some genuine evidence suggesting that voters were awarding injured or resting players more often than they had in the past. Look at the window between the 1999 lockout and 2011 lockout. We played 12 82-games seasons in that time, meaning a total of 180 All-NBA slots were handed out. Of those 180, only seven, or just under 4%, went to players who suited up less than 65 times.
But there’s another important element of timing here. The NBA’s last national media rights deal ended after the 2024-25 season. They were negotiating its replacement in the years leading up to then, most notably during the 2023-24 season. Hmm… what changed during the 2023-24 season? The adoption of the 65-game rule. And what happened in the seasons prior? Nine out of a possible 30 All-NBA slots went to player who frequently missed time.
It’s not hard to connect the dots here. The logical motivation for the 65-game rule had nothing to do with preserving the sanctity of awards races. It was a shot at the narrative of load management, an effort to assure possible new television partners that if it bought into the league, it could expect the best players in the sport to actually suit up for the games it aired. If you’re paying to broadcast LeBron James games, you want to feel reasonably assured that LeBron James is actually playing in them.
But here’s the thing about LeBron James: he’s old. So are a lot of the players making All-NBA with fewer than 65 games played. Of those 18 players to earn All-NBA honors in that 2013-to-2023 window, the average age was just a hair under 30 years old. That average was dragged down by two appearances by Joel Embiid in his age-23 and -24 seasons and Kawhi Leonard in his age-27 season. Both of them have dealt with degenerative medical issues they’ve never truly recovered from. Ja Morant, who made this list in his age-22 season, has dealt with his fair share of injuries as well. In other words, this list is essentially comprised of old players and injury-prone players.
And you know what happened to old players and injury-prone players in the past? They mostly just declined. Medical science is better today than it used to be. There’s a world in which players like Embiid and Leonard get hurt in their early 20s and never recover well enough to play at an All-NBA level. They both did. Rest was at least a part of what made that possible. There have been 15 All-NBA seasons from players 36 and older in league history. Only three of them came in the 20th century. LeBron James alone has four. Expand our range out to 35 year olds. We’ve seen 30 All-NBA seasons out of players in their age-35 or later season. Almost half of them, 14, have come in the load management era. So… has there been some epidemic of injury-prone players making All-NBA Teams? Or are old guys just maintaining their production longer than they used to, allowing voters to acknowledge what most of us would consider the truth: even a fading, occasionally resting LeBron James or Stephen Curry is probably more valuable than a younger player who’s available more often?
Players like that aren’t going to be swayed by another All-NBA nod. Frankly, James has probably lost track of how many of those he’s earned (the answer is 21, by the way, as James has been an All-NBA player in more than half of the years he’s been on this Earth). He’s going to focus on doing whatever it takes to keep his body in the best possible condition to extend his career and ensure his availability when the stakes get higher in the spring. The same is true for injury-prone players. You’re not going to bully Kawhi Leonard into playing when he doesn’t think he should.
But you know who is swayed by All-NBA eligibility? Younger players. Why? It’s not the honor of the award. It’s the money that comes with it. The NBA somehow doesn’t trust its award voters enough not to pick injured players, but does trust them enough to let them determine how much money its players can earn. When a player is chosen for All-NBA in the season before his contract expires or in two of the previous three seasons, he becomes eligible for a higher max salary. Players with less than six years of experience get bumped up from 25% of the cap in the first year of their deal to 30% thanks to the Derrick Rose Rule. Players with between seven and nine years of experience go from 30% to 35% due to the designated veteran rule, colloquially known as the “supermax.” There are other ways of earning this eligibility but, as MVP and Defensive Player of the Year usually aligns with All-NBA anyway, players know this is generally the target to shoot for in order to get those higher max contracts. But sometimes, chasing that money can do real harm to a player and his team.
Take Tyrese Haliburton. He played in 33 of Indiana’s first 36 games in the 2023-24 season. In that time, he was a genuine MVP candidate averaging just under 24 points and 13 assists on nearly 50-40-90 shooting. And then he hurt his hamstring. He missed five games, returned for one, then missed five more. He didn’t miss another game the rest of the season, eking out All-NBA eligibility with 69 games played. He also wasn’t the same player, averaging 16.8 points and 9.3 assists on far less efficient shooting than he had before the injury.
He was so good in the first half of the season that he still managed to sneak his way in as a Third-Team All-NBA selection, and he therefore got a 30% max contract. But it certainly seemed like he rushed back before he was ready. Haliburton himself essentially admitted that. In an interview with former podcaster JJ Redick in which Redick alluded to Haliburton’s “$53 million incentive to come back,” Indiana’s star guard acknowledged he might have handled his recovery differently without the 65-game rule.
“I thought I was ready to go for the Portland game. So did our medical staff. Everybody agreed,” he said. “But if this was never the case, I might have been like, ‘Give it another game or two. Maybe think more through this. Let’s try to be 100%.'”
Well, that injury seemingly bothered him even beyond that extension. He started slow last season before heating up as the season progressed and having a stellar postseason. The calf injury that would later snowball into a torn Achilles was unrelated, but the hamstring injury seemingly affected two separate seasons for him and the Pacers. Some injuries just tend to linger and many have the potential to get far worse if a player rushes back from them too quickly. Do we really want to incentivize them to do so? This is as much a critique of All-NBA voting affecting salaries as the 65-game rule, but they’re related in this case. Players now have a direct target to shoot for.
And conversely, the bar has been lowered for players who never get hurt at all. The All-NBA system is designed, at least in theory, to reward the 15 best players in a given season. Generally speaking, the 15 best players in the league at a given time are the sort of players teams feel comfortable giving giant contracts to, though no two sets of circumstances are identical. But let’s say the 65-game rule knocks a big chunk of the top 15 out of the running in a given season. That is happening as we speak. Jokić likely won’t play 65 games. Neither will Victor Wembanyama or Giannis Antetokounmpo. Luka Dončić isn’t in the danger zone yet, but given the minor injuries he so often accumulates, the seven games he’s missed already gives him little cushion. More injuries will inevitably come. We’re not even halfway through the season.
Suddenly, it’s not the 15 best players making All-NBA. It’s 15 of the best 19. Or 15 of the best 22. Or 15 of the best 26. Eventually, inevitably, players not typically worthy of All-NBA honors are going to make All-NBA Teams, and that could create problems in a number of directions. Obviously, there’s the risk of a team actually paying a player supermax money who doesn’t deserve it and hurting themselves in the long run because of it, but there’s also the chance that an eligible player asks for money he probably shouldn’t get, is denied, and it affects his relationship with the team. No player will enjoy hearing that they don’t deserve a supermax contract. At least without a 65-game minimum, better players will make the cut and teams would have some cover. “We’d love to offer you the supermax, but darn, you’re not eligible, oh well.”
There’s a contingent of terminally online basketball fans right now whining that the 65-game rule has only become a talking point because Jokić, specifically, has missed out on a chance to win his fourth MVP. But this has nothing to do with him. Not really, anyway. Rule or no, his injury handed Shai Gilgeous-Alexander the MVP trophy on a silver platter. We start to run into problems if Gilgeous-Alexander winds up getting hurt because of all of those other injuries we just mentioned, but for now, the 65-game rule really isn’t likely to swing the MVP race. It almost never does. This was never about trophies.
It’s about money. And maybe that’s what it takes for the NBA to admit this was a bad rule and repeal it. The new TV deal has been secured. Maybe a few bad supermax contracts will spring out of this change and coax a few aggrieved owners into action. Sure, it’d be nice if voters could be trusted to make their own determinations on injuries within the context of a given season. NBA history matters to the fans. But money is what matters to the stakeholders and this rule has far greater financial implications than most seem eager to admit. Money seemingly created this rule, so that might be what it takes to destroy it.