Cade Cunningham is likely to come up short in his bid for an All-NBA selection, and you can blame Joel Embiid and the NBA.
The 65-game rule has been all the talk lately, as it appears Cunningham will get screwed out of his rightful first-team All-NBA selection because he won’t meet the minimum number of games.
Cunningham is sitting on 61 games, and he needs 65, so unless there is a miraculous return at the end of the season, Cade’s dominance will go unrewarded.
Adam Silver, who has never once listened to what fans actually want but instead tells us what we want, thinks the system is just fine and that doing one of your best young players dirty is just part of the plan! Well done, Adam!
Punishing players for suffering serious injuries late in the season seems myopic and punitive, especially when you consider the stated reason for the dumb 65-game rule was to stop players from “load management” and sitting out games against bad teams to get extra rest.
Load management was never as big a problem as the talking heads made it, so the 65-game rule has done little but punish the best players for getting hurt.
And you can thank Joel Embiid.
NBA overreacted to a problem that wasn’t a real problem
Joel Embiid has made the All-NBA team five times in his career and only twice did he play at least 65 games. He failed to reach that mark in his first three All-NBA selections, playing 63, 64 and 51 games and making the 2nd team all three times before the 65-game rule was in place.
It was that last All-NBA selection that set people off, as Embiid played in just 51 games, but put up huge numbers on a team that won 49 games. The voters rewarded Embiid, but the league and the talking heads couldn’t stomach it.
We had to endure the insufferable Stephen A. Smith, and his ilk telling us how it was “shameful” (I didn’t feel shame, did you?) and “embarrassing” that Embiid was selected, as if it was a widespread problem.
The next season, Kawhi Leonard made the first team All-NBA playing 52 games, and the narrative took off from there. Cunningham will have played at least nine more this season but won't get his name called.
Embiid (and Kawhi to a lesser extent) was a special case, but the NBA clearly made the rule partially to deny him and those like him a spot on the All-NBA team if they didn’t make an arbitrary threshold that just happened to be right around the number of games Embiid was playing every year.
The NBA essentially made a rule for one guy, and it backfired, which is what happens when you collectively punish a group because of the actions of a small number of people.
The league apparently doesn’t trust its voters to be able to know when a guy has played enough, or whether his absences were because of rest or legit injuries.
Because of that, Cade Cunningham won’t make the All-NBA team even though he has played his butt off, hasn’t sat out for rest purposes, plays hard every game and got the injury diving on the floor in a meaningless contest against the Wizards.
In retrospect, it would have been better to just “load manage” those games, as he’ll miss more because he played hard and happened to get hurt.
Well done, Adam Silver! You are now forcing players to come back early from injuries and to rethink those rest days they weren’t taking, so this rule has had the exact opposite effect of its intent.