Why the NBA's 65-Game Awards Threshold Needs To Die

Andre Iguodala is the Executive Director of the NBA Players Association, but he might want to cede his spot to Anton Chigurh when it comes time to discuss the 65-game rule on his next trip to the league office.

Maybe it seems strange to suggest tagging in a fictional psychopath from a 19-year-old movie based on a 21-year-old novel by Cormac McCarthy, but Chigurh has a way of getting right to the point of things that could prove valuable. When dealing with a rule as clearly misguided as this one, it's important to cut through the nuance and ask simple questions.

Like this one:

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

What Is the Rule?

In order to qualify for several awards, and most importantly, Most Valuable Player and All-NBA honors, a player must appear in at least 65 games. With one small exception for players who suffered a season-ending injury after logging 62 games (and appearing in 85 percent of their team's games prior to the injury), that means players can only miss 17 games before disqualification.

Arrived at during collective bargaining between owners and players prior to the 2023-24 season, the rule was designed to address several issues.

Load management had become a thing; players were sometimes sitting out nationally televised games due to "rest" and the NBA's media rights deal was coming up for negotiation in March of 2024. That last part was highly relevant.

Per Joe Vardon of The Athletic: "One top network executive ... reached out to [NBA commissioner Adam Silver] to express his displeasure. He was frustrated that the league's star players were sitting out marquee broadcasts."

Joe Dumars, the NBA's head of basketball operations at the time, admitted to Vardon that the impending media rights negotiations were a factor in crafting the rule.

Where Has It Brought Us?

In some order, Nikola Jokić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Luka Dončić are probably the league's top five players. This rule creates a world where most or all of them won't even be considered for the MVP award or All-NBA honors.

Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, LeBron James, and Joel Embiid are already ineligible. Jokić can miss one more game before disqualification. SGA's magic number is five. Wemby (four), Dončić (five), and Anthony Edwards (seven) are all staring down the real possibility of brilliant seasons that conclude with zero hardware.

Maybe this isn't a problem for you. Maybe you believe durability is a major factor in award-worthiness, and that a hard cutoff is a good enough way to make sure quantity is properly weighted against quality.

Even if that's your stance, some part of you has to be bristling at the potential for historical inaccuracy.

Awards are a big deal when assessing players, eras, and the general state of the game. Twenty years from now, a researcher might look back at the awards slate from 2025-26 and conclude that the half-dozen best players in the league all got beamed up into a flying saucer and disappeared forever. Because what else would explain Cade Cunningham running away with MVP and, let's say, Scottie Barnes making All-NBA First Team.

Just imagine if Wembanyama, indisputably the best defender in the sport, doesn't get officially recognized as the Defensive Player of the Year because he played 64 games instead of 65.

Forget the "preserving the historical record" aspect for a moment and consider the 65-game rule's blindingly incongruous fit with another critical issue in the NBA discourse.

The NBA game has never been more physically demanding. The average speed and distance covered by players are greater than they have ever been. Unsurprisingly, calf strains (a precursor to devastating Achilles tears) are skyrocketing. Despite ample evidence that more rest is necessary, we've got a rule that incentivizes players to rest less—particularly in cases where certain awards are tied to major financial stakes.

What. Could. Go. Wrong?

Of What Use Was the Rule?

Other than helping get new media rights deals worth $77 billion, not a whole lot!

Maybe that's too glib. The NBA is an entertainment product, and it's certainly a sign of the product's health and appeal that media companies are willing to pay so much to make it available to audiences. It's admittedly pretty clear that the product is more entertaining, and therefore more valuable, if the best representatives of it (the top players) are on the floor more often.

But just look at the list of certain and likely award ineligibles up there. It's pretty hard to argue that the rule is achieving its intended purpose—unless that purpose was to bamboozle Amazon, NBC, and ESPN into thinking their broadcasts would feature fewer games missed by stars. It definitely did that.

Small concern, but the rule also disempowers award voters. In the before times, they had to decide whether 60 games played at a higher level were more "valuable" than 70 played at a lower one when considering MVP. Ditto for All-NBA nods and several other awards.

Thanks to a host of widely available metrics, that problem is easier to solve than ever. And outside of the occasional rogue ballot that ignored numbers and good sense, the voting results were always excellent time capsules for each particular NBA season.

Not anymore!

By Chigurh's logic, the 65-game rule has brought us to a point where the league's best players are insufficiently recognized for their contributions, and where the incentive structure actually increases the potential for missed time.

This is not a useful rule. Time to kill it.

Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference, and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.

Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.