According to Shams Charania, the NBA, and the Players’ Association are nearing an agreement to establish a minimum number of games played for players to be eligible for the MVP award and other honors. This is another step in the ongoing crusade to prevent teams from engaging in load management, or at least from overdoing it. It is also a waste of time.
Of the top thirty scorers in the NBA as of Monday morning, only eight have played at least 60 games. Extrapolating that to the end of the season, most of the main MVP candidates will end up playing fewer than 70 games. Does that mean that Joel Embiid and Luka Doncic should be ineligible for the MVP? No! It means that voters should be sensible enough to factor a player’s availability into their vote.
The NBA shouldn’t have a minimum number of games played to qualify for awards.
So far this season, Embiid has missed 13 games and Doncic has missed eleven. Common sense should tell you that hurts their cases compared with Nikola Jokic’s (eight games missed) or Jayson Tatum’s (five). But if Embiid or Doncic have outperformed the other candidates by so much that the number of games they have played becomes a secondary issue, they should still be the MVP. Voters are rational enough to make that assessment, including games played with everything else that factors into the decision.
Will they get it right every time? Of course not! But it’s not as though the voters have a pristine history of picking the best player anyway. Google “Worst Choices for NBA MVP” and you’ll find a long list of years where sentiment and flashiness have outweighed actual value in how the voting turned out. As you’ll see below, voters actually have a stronger record of weighing games played properly than many other factors.
Now, at this point, we don’t know how many games will be required to be eligible for these awards. It’s hard to imagine it will be as high as 70 games because it seems doubtful that players would agree to a rule that makes most of them ineligible for MVP. If the standard was 60 games, most voters would rule out voting for someone who had missed more than 20 games anyway. Bill Walton is the only MVP to play fewer than 60 games in a non-strike season, and Walton’s Blazers were so dominant that season when he played that it was hard to consider anyone else for the award.
There’s another aspect of this that needs to be considered. It stands to reason that if there will be a minimum number of games required for the MVP award, there might be a similar standard for all-league teams or all-defense teams. As the CBA stands now, players are eligible for a higher maximum contract if they make an All-League team, and some players have incentive clauses in their contracts that give them bonuses for individual honors. As many players have pointed out, the decision on when to exercise “load management” is frequently out of the player’s hands.
So, what happens the first time a player comes up one game short of playing enough games to receive an individual honor, and it costs him tens of millions of dollars? What if that player needs to play in the last game of the year to reach the threshold, and his coach says no to saving him for the playoffs? If you don’t see the potential for some ugly manipulations taking place, you’re not being realistic.
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Author: Jeff Mount
