The NBA's 65-Game Rule Was Supposed to Fix Basketball. It's Destroying the Best Awards Race in Years.

I need to tell you about the dumbest thing happening in the NBA right now.

Victor Wembanyama — 24.8 points, 11.5 rebounds, 3.1 blocks per game on a 61-win team — might not qualify for MVP or Defensive Player of the Year. Not because someone's better. Not because the voters don't want him. Because of a bruised rib and a bureaucratic checkbox.

He needs 20 minutes. That's it. Twenty minutes of court time in one of the Spurs' final two games, and he crosses the 65-game threshold that the NBA decided was the magic number for awards eligibility. Twenty minutes between making history and having it erased by a rule nobody asked for.

His MRI came back clean on Tuesday. No fracture. No cartilage damage. Just a nasty contusion from colliding with Paul George near half court against the Sixers on Monday. Doctors say these things usually sideline players for 10 to 14 days. The Spurs play Dallas on Friday. That's four days.

So now the entire basketball world is watching a 7-foot-4 generational talent try to gut through a rib injury — not to win a playoff game, not to clinch a seed, but to check a box on a form. This is what we're doing now.

The body count of the 65-game rule this season is staggering.

Twelve All-Star caliber players have been eliminated from awards consideration. Let me run through the list because it's genuinely absurd:

Luka Doncic — the NBA's leading scorer — was eliminated when he tore his hamstring in his 64th game. Sixty-four. One game short. He's now filing an "extraordinary circumstances grievance" because two of his missed games were for the birth of his daughter. The NBA is going to have an arbitrator decide whether becoming a father counts as extraordinary enough to let a man win MVP. I wish I was making this up.

Cade Cunningham had his lung literally collapse in his 61st game. The NBPA released a statement calling his potential ineligibility "a clear indictment of the 65-game rule." The kid was having the best season on the best team in the East. His reward for returning from a collapsed lung and dropping a double-double? Ineligibility.

Anthony Edwards — third in scoring — got knocked out because he missed one game with a knee injury. One game.

LeBron James? Gone in February. Left foot arthritis. His 18th missed game made it mathematically impossible.

Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Joel Embiid, Lauri Markkanen, Michael Porter Jr. — all eliminated. Not because they were load managing. Because they were hurt.

This is exactly the opposite of what the rule was supposed to do.

The 65-game rule came out of the 2023 CBA. The idea was simple: stop Kawhi Leonard and others from sitting out 20 games for "load management" and then winning awards over guys who played every night. Fair enough. I get the logic. If you don't show up, you shouldn't get the trophy.

But there's a massive difference between a guy choosing to sit and a guy's lung collapsing. The rule doesn't care about the difference. It treats a hamstring tear the same as a scheduled rest day. It treats appendicitis the same as a DNP-CD.

And the result? The most loaded awards race in recent memory — one where you could genuinely argue five or six different MVP candidates — has been gutted. The ballot is thinner than it should be. Not because the players weren't good enough. Because they were unlucky enough to get hurt.

Look at who's still eligible. SGA, who's scored 20 or more in 138 straight games. Jokic, who's averaging a triple-double for the full season. Wembanyama — if his rib cooperates for 20 minutes on Friday. These three are all-time level this year. But the conversation around them is being shaped by absence, by who isn't on the ballot, not by who is.

The 20-minute absurdity

Here's what kills me about Wemby's situation specifically. The rule says you need to appear in 65 games. But "appear" has a footnote — you need to log at least 20 minutes for it to count. So if Wembanyama comes back Friday, plays 19 minutes, and his rib flares up? Doesn't count. He could physically be on the court, contributing to a win, and the league would shrug and say sorry, you needed one more minute.

The Spurs have 61 wins. They have the best defense in the NBA — largely because of Wembanyama. He's shooting 35.2% on 8.8 threes per game as a 7-foot-4 center who also blocks 3.1 shots a night. Nobody in the history of the sport has ever done what he's doing. And the question right now isn't "is he the MVP?" It's "will the league let him be?"

Gregg Popovich — or whoever's making the call in San Antonio — now has to weigh the risk of playing a guy with a bruised rib in a game that doesn't matter for seeding against the possibility of his franchise player losing two major awards. That's not a basketball decision. That's a paperwork decision. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder if anyone in the league office has actually watched a game this season.

The rule punishes the wrong people

Here's the irony nobody's talking about: the guys who were actually load managing? They adjusted. They play their 65 games now, sit the rest, and collect their awards. The rule didn't change behavior for the load managers. It just created a cliff for the injured.

The NBPA wants it abolished or reformed. Fox Sports reported the league is "facing pressure" to alter the threshold. The Ringer called it "tanking awards season." Tracy McGrady predicted the NBA will make an exception for Luka because of the "extraordinary circumstances" provision. CBS Sports wrote that the rule "was a bandage for a symptom that never addressed the root issue."

Everyone agrees it's broken. Nobody's fixed it yet.

What should happen

The simplest fix: add an injury exception. If a player misses games due to a documented injury — not rest, not personal reasons, an actual injury — those games shouldn't count against the threshold. You can keep the 65-game rule for load management. Just stop punishing guys whose bodies failed them.

Or lower the threshold. Or weight it by minutes played. Or do literally anything other than watching a 22-year-old try to play through a rib contusion in a meaningless game because a committee decided 65 was the right number three years ago.

Victor Wembanyama is trending toward playing Friday against Dallas. If he gives them 20 minutes, he qualifies for both MVP and DPOY. If his rib says no, the best individual season in the NBA this year gets an asterisk it doesn't deserve.

The 65-game rule was built to protect the integrity of awards. All it's done is make them a joke.