I heard Bill Simmons talk about using minutes in his last episode

Mentioned how Maxey is 3rd in the league in total minutes (at the time) and yet he wouldn’t be eligible for any All-NBA teams or awards which is ridiculous.

Zach Lowe (whose opinions I generally respect) hates the rules because he says that voters should be capable of discerning availability as one of the factors towards awards.

That makes sense in theory, but when you remember who the voters are (like Big Perk), then this argument becomes terrible.

I’m not against a minutes requirement but I don’t think it will fix the problem. Just kick the can further down the road until the next edge case appears and we do this all over again

These are players are on guaranteed contracts playing for bonuses. If you can’t be on the court for most of your team’s games, for whatever reason, then tough shit

if the players didn’t want it they shouldn’t have agreed to it. It’s their own fault.

I like the rules as it stands. 65 games played with 20 mins req in each is more than fair to players and fans. The idea of minutes req sounds good until you start seeing guys play in blowouts more to cheese the min requirement.

The notion that the 65 games played is some ridiculously high standard is insane. It sucks what happened to Cade but that’s the name of the game. We’re seeing Wemby, Luka, Jokic, SGA push through the minor injuries and playing on b2b to make the requirement which is good for fans who spend their hard earned money and time on these games and want to see the best play and not sit out for minor injuries or resting just because they were allowed to prior to this rule.

As an aside, I find it funny when players play 1 possession to get a contract bonus or keep a game playing streak going - like Jrue Holiday on the Bucks and Mikal Bridges in the past

Or like Josh Allen playing a snap for the Bills in the last regular season game earlier this year

The minutes alternative makes sense: 65 games or 2000 minutes.

Another alternative is to simply have a penalty for games-missed or minutes-missed.
Award-voting is point based (see for example here results from last year), so you could simply say that every additional missed game is a -20 penalty on the total votes you receive.

This removes a hard cutoff, while still penalizing players who rest on purpose. And we won’t have scenarios where Jokic doesn’t even make All-NBA Third team because he plays 64 games.

Instead of changing the 65 games threshold, I’d be fine just tweaking what it applies to. Instead of requiring it for basically all postseason honors, just have it apply to MVP and 1st team all-NBA. Players can still win the lesser awards, and no one who really deserves it will miss out on getting a super max because they still can trigger the raise by making 2nd or 3rd team all-NBA. I just can’t get worked up over Cade Cunningham or Anthony Edwards missing out on 1st team all-NBA over someone like Jaylen Brown. They are better than him, but these awards are meant to show who had the better season or who had the greater impact, not who is the better player. 70+ games of JB is more valuable than 61 games of Ant or Cade, without question. If you want to win the real big stuff, the things that really matter in the history books and legacy conversations, find a way to not miss ¹⁄₅ of your team’s games. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

The 65 Game Rule has worked in encouraging players to play

Has it? What empirical evidence do we have to support this claim?

And I don’t mean anecdotal examples of injured players playing.

There’s a waiver process. If you are 41 seconds away or within a game of meeting the requirements then it seems reasonable to grant the waiver. The nba should have some internal docs about what the criteria for granting waivers is (i.e ok to grant waivers down to 62 games played with xyz minutes played), but keep the official standards the same. A player can complain about not getting an award at 61 games but the league can then just go back and say you were 4 games off the official requirement!

It stops you from diluting the games played requirements and you’re not being arbitrary because there are documented waiver standards.

Can we see the list of players that won awards or were All NBA that this rule would have kicked out.

I think it’s so funny that we’ve all got a mental block on solutions that actually make sense and try to think of random thresholds instead where there’s always gonna be edge cases.

It would completely solve the problem to just have everyone vote for who they thought was most deserving on a per game basis, and then add some manipulation of percent of games played as an added weight on top of what the vote counts for. I’m also pretty sure we’d all hate it more lol.

What I don’t understand is why we’re putting rules on awards that are voted on. Like, do we need to place restrictions on voters? If they think someone is worthy of All-NBA, surely the vote should be enough, regardless of how many games they’ve played?

Should be 72 games and 25+ minutes for starters. There needs to be incentive for these guys to play or they’ll just load manage and sit marquee match ups. Can’t go back to the past cause it didn’t work

Can someone explain why DiVincenzo’s name is there? He played 81 games which satisfies the 65 game criteria

Isn’t it just easier to make some changes to the rubric for these awards? Either tell the media people to take into account a player’s game count or penalize their combined score? The people who could win a season award while playing less than 60 games are the ones who are just so ahead of the game for whatever reason like Wemby for DPOY the last two years.

I think the could tweak it to put an actual two-week injury in a different category than skipping Back to backs for load management.

The current rule is great. I’m fine with a 50 game min for 3rd team, but otherwise, 65 games is perfect. Play and give the fans a proper showing if you want to be eligible for awards and money

Apparently Bill Simmons proposed this too but that wasn’t where I was actually getting it from.

Was it from the person who had the most upvoted comment in the thread about Cade a few hours ago?

They should have like a soft limit where votes get scale down when you miss more games. Like is a 25+5+5 player with 66 games more valuable than a player with 35+7+7 with 64 games. But if the 35+7+7 guy only played 32 games then it’s a different story

If we need fewer games and no one will agree it it, isn’t minutes a decent idea there too? Still do 82 games but cap minutes per game at something like 36 or something. Make teams have benches.

The 65 Game Rule has worked in encouraging players to play

So you claimed. Do you have anything to back that up?

So how many minutes has Cade played?

Lol Embiid wins MVP & everyone is for the rule… The great white hypes(Luka, Jokic) start getting affected and now people want the rule changed again 😂

The worst thing about this rule is people talking about it all year long. It’s a stupid distraction at this point. An arbitrary hard number limit for something the voters could just consider themselves.

What player has been encouraged to play because of the rule?

It’s what you lead off with, but where is the proof of that?

I think the rule could be altered where the number of games is a percentage, let’s say 80% (⁶⁵⁄₈₂=.792), but it doesn’t count injury time where a player is just isn’t medically cleared to play.

This gets around the complaint about players missing the 65-game cutoff due to injuries that are out of their control by giving them a bit more grace to not rush back from injuries, while also encouraging players who aren’t injured to play more games and not just DNP (rest).

Didn’t know about the 20 minute thing, that should go, the 65 game minimum should stay

The limit ONLY makes sense if you are using computers to make the teams. Humans vote on these things and can literally just make their own decisions.

If we can’t trust them to know the difference between SGA playing 60 games or whatever and someone playing 30 then why are we letting them put the damn teams together in the first place?

The rule is right as is. The voters showed that they could be trusted to account for games played in their criteria, which emboldened stars to aggressively load manage to elongate their careers.

The NbA setting a hard line has only been good for the game

It just feels like trying to address a problem that didnt really exist. Folks would rather have believed guys like Kawhi and Embiid were cowards ducking smoke than genuinely being injured and cautious about it.

In a normal world someone like Cade would still receive some degree of honors at the end of the season for the incredible turnaround Detroit pulled. But ig he missed 4 more games than he was allowed to.

In hindsight it probably should have always been a minutes thing

Honestly if I was Cade and I really wanted to get all nba honors

I’d suit up for one second every game foul then check out lol

If the doctors would allow it

Get rid of the rule, but put the number of games played and MPG average on the ballot so voters are consciously aware of what they’re voting for.

If you sit out for load management or rest you should be ineligible for awards. Sitting out for anything else should be fair game.

If you sit out for load management or rest you should be ineligible for awards. Sitting out for actual injuries should be fair game.