The problem with the 65-game award threshold

PLUS: Rudy-Rudy-Rudy-Rudy-Rudy stay home.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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The Green Wave, Claude Monet, 1866

It’s now awards season in the NBA. As you know, I do not have a ballot. As such, I’m not going to go into a long thing with who I would have voted for if I did have a ballot. Why invite the backlash? Other than getting a piece of content and some ~engagement~ out of it, where’s the upside? I’ve been yelled at by Nuggets and Sixers fans enough already. (Bucks fans, you’re saints.)

You know, actually, since I have no obligations to vote for the awards I also have no obligations to abide the voting rules. You know who I would have picked for MVP? I would have split my vote three ways between Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Like Cady Heron splits the Spring Fling crown. You’re all MVPs in my eyes!

(I definitely offended both some Sixers and Nuggets fans with that paragraph. Sorry. Bucks fans: you are saints.)

I do have thoughts on the reported new 65-game threshold for some or all NBA awards that will kick in with the new collective bargaining agreement. This is one of the novelty items of new labor deal, something that will grab headlines and fuel discourse but not actually matter much for team-building.

Except when it does. And when it does, it will almost assuredly matter in the service of screwing teams and/or star players.

The intent is likely to encourage stars to play a marginal number of additional games. Sixty-five games constitutes 79% of an 82-game season. You can miss 17 total games and still hit 65. I suspect players who suffer serious enough injuries will not “rush” back to hit the 65-game mark. Where it matters is to minimize the load management rest days, and to cause stars to want to play in potentially meaningless games down the stretch if they are close to the threshold.

Let’s look at two examples. Anthony Davis was playing at an All-NBA caliber before his December injury, and has been playing at an All-NBA caliber since returning. Before the injury, he played in 25 of 28 games. After the injury, he played in 31 of 34 games. So essentially he played at an All-NBA level in 90% of the Lakers’ games this season … except when he missed 20 straight games with a significant injury. Under the new NBA award rules, once he misses those 20 games (and realistically about 15), the award-based incentive to play consistently disappears. Because the Lakers were in a fight to make the postseason at all, there was a competitive team incentive to keep playing. But if the Lakers had locked in their seed or already been eliminated, AD probably plays less down the stretch if All-NBA is off the table. I suspect he and the Lakers believe that for this season it remains on the table.

Another example: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who will certainly be on the All-NBA team. He barely made the 65-game threshold, finishing with 68 games played despite never having an injury that cost him more than five straight games. He took a number of games off here and there for bumps and bruises. Assuming he wanted to make All-NBA — a fair assumption given contract implications! — had he missed a few more games early in the season, he would have been forced to play banged-up every night down the stretch to hit the threshold. As the league and all these teams well know, playing injured leaves players more susceptible to major injury. It seems like a risk that should be factored in here.

But that’s what the NBA is trying to get here: more games played for the biggest stars in the league. Setting a hard threshold instead of relying on voters to gauge availability themselves as one of several factors will potentially lead some stars with no chance to hit the threshold to play less and will force some stars to play dinged-up down the stretch regardless of the risk or team stakes. It’s unavoidable when the contract stakes are so high.

The other thing this necessarily does is expand the universe of super-max players. If even a single would-be All-NBA player is ruled ineligible due to missing the 65-game threshold, then that creates a spot on the 15-person All-NBA roster for a player who otherwise would not have earned a spot. If three, or five worthy players miss the threshold, that’s three or five players who make it in their places and become eligible for bigger contracts, depending on the timing of their free agency.

That’s going to have an effect on team-building. That means contracts at 35% of the salary cap for players who are about the 20th to 30th best players in the league. That already happens occasionally now, when a second-tier star has a really nice season and gets in past a bigger star who spends a season struggling or injured. That one season of glory, if timed right, can mean a huge amount of money. But it’s almost certainly going to happen more regularly now.

The NBA addressed this coming problem in one minor way: they eliminated positionality in All-NBA voting, which has been needed for a long time given the blurring of positional lines and the weird rules around players who qualify at multiple positions. We had seasons in the 2010s where finding a third high-caliber center for All-NBA was tough. We have other incidents where there’s a clearly better frontcourt or backcourt option but only a slot for the other position. That goes away and should marginally improve the overall quality of the All-NBA team in the aggregate. But it’s a small adjustment. The 65-game threshold is a big one.

Here are some All-NBA candidates in 2022-23 who did not play 65 games:

• Giannis Antetokounmpo

• Stephen Curry

• Damian Lillard

• Jimmy Butler

• Anthony Davis

• LeBron James

• Jaren Jackson Jr.

• Ja Morant

• Devin Booker

• Kevin Durant

• Paul George

• Kawhi Leonard

That’s 12 players, all with legitimate, affirmative All-NBA cases. I obviously would not have selected all 12 if I had a ballot and made picks — there are 12 or so players who did play 65+ games and have legitimate, affirmative All-NBA cases, many of them much stronger than most of these players.

Most of those players will miss All-NBA this season without the hard threshold largely due to a lack of availability and the presence of superior candidates. Games missed is already priced into the deliberations for individual voters.

Giannis and Curry will certainly still make it; Lillard, Butler and perhaps one or both of Booker and Morant are likely, too. Had the threshold been in place, Giannis and Butler finished close enough (64 games) to make sure they hit it but playing one more night down the stretch. Curry and Booker were too far away. Morant knocked himself off pace with the suspension (though you wonder if the All-NBA threshold would play into the NBA’s deliberations over Morant’s suspension — more complications). Lillard’s team sat him to tank, preventing him from getting close, which is going to be a whole ‘nother kettle of fish in the future.

When you take that many awesome performers completely off the table due to a relatively arbitrary rule, some years it will be impossible to avoid the reality that lesser players will get the honor. The NBA is fine with that, provided it means that their best players, on balance, take fewer rest days.

However, we know that teams and not players are largely pushing the load management paradigm. Teams do not have a real incentive to get their players onto All-NBA: making All-NBA, as we noted, means higher potential salaries on contract extensions, which limits teams’ flexibility around their stars. So we now have a potential tension in which players want to rest less to hit the 65-game mark and be eligible for All-NBA, while teams both want to preserve their stars’ health and energy for the postseason and have a disincentive when it comes to All-NBA eligibility. It’s quite a pickle!

Maybe this won’t amount to much in the end, but there are a whole mess of potential unintended consequences involved, just like when the NBA started tying contract maximums to All-NBA results. The more complex the system gets, the more opportunity for discord and tomfoolery.