NBA commissioner Adam Silver has been proactive in making changes, and he’s usually made them with the fans in mind. Take the 65-game rule, for example. The rule, implemented in 2023, stated that in order to be eligible for postseason awards, a player must play in at least 65 games in a season.
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The main reason this was enacted was the load management epidemic. Star players were taking nights off all the time in the name of load management, often during nationally televised games or road games where opposing fans would miss their one opportunity all year to see that player. The thinking was, forcing players to play in at least 65 games to be eligible for All-NBA, MVP, etc. would stop them from resting when they didn’t need to.
The idea was noble, but there have been some unintended consequences. For one thing, player salaries are tied to whether or not they make All-NBA. You need to make All-NBA to be eligible for a supermax contract, for instance, meaning if a player fell just below the mandatory threshold, it could cost him tens of millions of dollars.
The rule also punishes players who have legitimate injuries and miss extended periods. If we really want the All-NBA teams to be a snapshot of the league’s best players, are we getting that if some greats are left off because they got hurt?
On the newest episode of Mind the Game, LeBron James and Tyrese Haliburton explored the ramifications of the 65-game rule, and explained why they expect it to change in the near future.
“I’m looking at this list right now,” LeBron said, “We got one of our biggest names, Nikola Jokic, we got Giannis, we got Wembanyama, Steph done missed games, Kawhi done missed games, Sengun, obviously AR [Austin Reaves] my teammate, Jalen Williams is out again.”
Put those guys together on a team and they’d probably beat the rest of the league straight up, but all are in danger of falling below 65 games due to injury, which means none of them will be able to make All-NBA, All-Defensive, MVP or Defensive Player of the Year.
LeBron highlighted the absurdity of it all by wondering aloud how Jokic could possibly be left out of the conversation with the historic stats he’s putting up. “You can’t tell me that Jokic is not All-NBA all of a sudden, because he’s missed 30 games, you’re trying to tell me he’s not First Team All-NBA? The guy’s averaging 29, 13 and 14 or some s*** like that.”
Hali made it clear that he’s always been against the 65-game rule, because it was implemented during his contract year where he needed to make All-NBA to be eligible for a supermax. He still doesn’t like it, and both LeBron and he think it could hurt the legacy of current players when fans look back years from now.
“What I think about is in 20, 30 years when I’m not playing and I’m hearing my kids argue about, they want to compare eras or something, and they’re going over the list of accolades, and they’re telling me right now that this guy might have only made All-NBA so many times, but he was ineligible, and they don’t know that, and that could skew it in that way, which I don’t really appreciate in any way,” he added.
Hali brought up Wemby as a perfect example of why the rule should, and will, be changed.
“For him to not be in the conversation for Defensive Player of the Year, when there’s a very good chance that he could win multiple over the course of his career,” he said, “to take that away from him or other guys because of health, I feel like is incorrect.”
Haliburton is one of the best embodiments in the league for ‘love of the game,’ and he seemed to send a message directly to Adam Silver when he said, “NBA players, we wanna play. We don’t want to sit down. We wanna play, so I feel like there has to be a conversation for sure.”
Pushback on the rule has gotten louder and louder recently, and having two of the league’s best players put it on blast here will only help the cause. Given Silver’s history of being progressive in a lot of ways, it seems almost a certainty that the rule will be revisited this summer to make it more fair for players who are actually hurt.
Until then, the NBA won’t quite reach ‘Shedeur Sanders going to the Pro Bowl’ level of ridiculousness, but it also won’t have a representative snapshot of the best players each season.
