Is the NBA’s 65-Game Awards Threshold Unreasonable?

Let's look at how often the NBA's new rule would have affected awards in the past.

Even when the NBA tries to keep load management and player rest from being a major talking point of the season, it backfires.

Usually, the league has done little to address the phenomenon of star players sitting out regular season games in recent years. But commissioner Adam Silver and the league’s brain trust went into 2023-24 with a full-court press against the issue, releasing research showing that load management wasn’t correlated with reduced injuries and instituting a new rule that players must play at least 65 games to be eligible for the MVP, All-NBA, Defensive Player of the Year, All-Defense or Most Improved Player honors.

And with that, the league created an entirely new problem. Because now, one of the season’s biggest storylines is whether this games-played threshold will affect the race for MVP and All-NBA — and in the process, cost players big money, since those awards are tied to contractual rules around max salaries.

"I think it's a stupid rule, like plenty of the guys in the league,” said Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton, who (along with Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid) is one of the stars most in danger of being affected by the new policy. (My pal

Tom Haberstroh

has a tracker for what he calls the “79 Line”, or whether a player is above or below the 79% of scheduled games threshold required to be eligible.)

“But this is what the owners want, so as players, we gotta do our job and play in 65 games if we're able to,” Haliburton said.

The specific number of 65 games just sounds highly arbitrary, which makes the rule seem more unreasonable — particularly since it makes no distinction between injury types, severity, etc. Where did that number even come from?

Most likely, it resulted from the league office looking at how many games MVP winners have typically played. If we look at the entire history of the award, and pro-rate shortened/early seasons to 82 game schedules, here’s a breakdown of how many MVPs have played each number of games in a season:

Of the award’s 68 all-time winners, 67 — or 98.5% — played in more than 65 games (or the equivalent of that in a shorter season). The only exception was in 1977-78, when Bill Walton famously won MVP despite playing in only 58 contests because of a season-ending foot injury. In this context, it doesn’t seem quite so unreasonable to expect future MVPs to log at least 65 games — although we have a recent near-counter-example, as Embiid himself only cleared the 65-game threshold by 1 game last season en route to the award.

How about if we look at all of the award types that might be affected by the 65-game rule, not just the MVP:

Here, we see more of a precedent for players earning honors while logging fewer than the equivalent of 65 games. While 1,521 of the 1,624 total award recipients — yes, I cataloged them all from this ESPN dataset — played at least 65 contests, representing 93.7% of all players honored, there was also a long tail of cases where players would not have been eligible to win the award today. (Folks talk about Jaren Jackson Jr. playing only 63 games last season but still winning Defensive Player of the Year, but shoutout to my guy Andrei Kirilenko making the All-Defensive team in 2004-05 despite playing only 41 games, or half the schedule!)

The league might be OK with boxing out 6.3% of potentially deserving award recipients if it means motivating stars to play more. But again, for that 6.3%, these honors could potentially mean tens of millions of dollars. An All-NBA nod for Haliburton would add a whopping $40 million to his contract extension — an amount of money that would be really tough to lose out on because of a line in the sand based on historical MVP trends.

And that’s not the only reason to argue against the 65-game rule. The great

Kofie Yeboah

does a terrific job of articulating the paradox of the policy: We want stars to play more during the regular season, even through injury if necessary… but then judge their entire legacies on the basis of what they do in the playoffs, which might be at cross-purposes with playing those extra regular season games. That’s kind of unfair.

There’s even an anti-democratic bent to the policy. Even though it’s intended to work in the opposite direction, as a deterrent against sitting, it also implies that award voters aren’t capable of correctly judging player value, and need guardrails to keep a player like a Bill Walton — or this year, potentially, an Embiid or Haliburton — from winning while playing too few games. That’s kind of paternalistic.

Based on the outcry, and the worst-case scenarios that have already come up around it, I would imagine this rule gets tweaked at some point in the near future. At a glance, the 65 game mark might seem reasonable; after all, it only would have changed one historical MVP race, and a small fraction of other award decisions over the years. But even with history on the league’s side, the unintended downsides might still be too great to keep the policy as-is.

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Filed under: NBA