It’d be hard to argue that Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards was not among the 15 best players in the NBA this season. He’s the league’s third-leading scorer and the only All-Star on a team that has all but clinched a spot in the 2026 playoffs. Dig through the all-in-one metrics — Box Plus/Minus, PER, VORP and the like — and he pops up in the top 15 more often than not. He’s having the most efficient shooting season of his career while remaining a plus defender — a notable development considering he’s a back-to-back All-NBA choice.
Yet Edwards won’t make All-NBA this season as he’ll fall short of the league’s controversial 65-game threshold thanks to his absence on Thursday against the Detroit Pistons with a right knee injury and illness. He can technically still appear in 65 games. But he can’t rack up 65 eligible ones (playing at least 20 minutes), because in Minnesota’s third game of the season, he left having played only three.
Missing out on All-NBA isn’t just a legacy matter for Edwards. It has tangible consequences. An All-NBA selection would have assured him supermax eligibility for the contract extension he is eligible to sign in the 2027 offseason. Now, despite already having two All-NBA picks in his back pocket, he’ll have to make it again next season to ensure that eligibility. All because, in the end, he will have missed somewhere between one and seven too many games.
Five proposals to fix the NBA’s controversial 65-game rule as NBPA officially calls for change
Sam Quinn
If a system in which voters have the power to determine how much money a player can earn but not the amount of unavailability should dictate whether or not they can earn that extra money sounds broken to you, you’re not alone. The NBA’s 65-game awards eligibility minimum has come under fire throughout the 2025-26 season, and while Edwards is the first especially prominent borderline case to officially be ruled out, he likely won’t be the last.
Cade Cunningham, Nikola Jokic and Kawhi Leonard are each one missed game away from ineligibility. A number of other prominent players — Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid and LeBron James, for instance — were never really in the hunt because of early-season absences, but those absences weren’t all necessarily created equal.
Take James. He is capable of playing in no more than 61 games this season, his fate essentially sealed by his 14-game absence to open the season. Yet he has played 1,844 minutes this season. Victor Wembanyama, who will be eligible if he plays three more times in San Antonio’s last five games, has played 1,784. He’s participated in six more games, but in terms of minutes, he has actually played about a game-and-a-half less than James has. The rule has no allowance for such situations.
Nor does it weigh awards by prestige. When Jokić returned from his knee injury in January, it allowed him to re-enter the MVP race. However, one more absence and he not only misses out on a chance at MVP, but All-NBA as well. We all agree MVP is more historically meaningful than All-NBA. The rules even make that explicit. When supermax eligibility is determined, a player needs to make All-NBA either in the most recent season or in two of the previous three. However, an MVP at any point in the previous three seasons creates eligibility. Yet there is no distinction made between how much a player needs to play to win MVP or be named Third-Team All-NBA.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver recently argued that the 65-game rule is working. The consensus among fans and media seems to differ. It really depends on your definition. If the goal of awards is to establish an accurate historical record, it’s not clear what problem the rule really addresses. Voters weren’t frequently going rogue and picking 55-game MVPs. When we look back on the 2025-26 season, we’ll remember Edwards and Cunningham far more than the less deserving players who claim their spots. If the goal is to ensure that only worthy players get those bigger contracts, the rule is directly counterproductive. Minnesota would eagerly give Edwards a supermax deal with or without an All-NBA choice next year, but the borderline player who takes his spot is probably less deserving of such a contractual bump.
If these are indeed the goals of the rule, then at the very least, these sorts of common-sense exceptions are needed. The reason not to create such exceptions or meaningfully reexamine the rule is if it exists primarily as a carrot for players to chase, something to compel them to play in games they might otherwise have sat out. Considering Silver cited the idea that “there’s not nearly as much discussion around load management as there was, in part because the teams and the players have responded” to the rule, it seems like that’s the case.
And if so, it’s a shame, because Edwards really didn’t need a reason not to load manage. Before this season, he’d missed 19 games in five years. It took legitimate injuries to keep Edwards from playing 65 games, injuries that voters likely would have been more willing to forgive if given the choice.
Instead, a season in which Edwards was almost indisputably a top-15 player won’t receive the historical or financial recognition it deserves. He wasn’t the first player punished by this broken rule, and he won’t be the last.
