There is no world in which Detroit Pistons star Cade Cunningham doesn't deserve to make an All-NBA team this season, but unfortunately, that will be the case. He'll be out for at least two weeks with a collapsed lung. It's unfair that he will be punished for that under the league's 65-game rule, meant to curb load management (spoiler: it hasn't worked).
It was already evident that the NBA needed to abolish the rule before the Cunningham news broke, as players deserving of end-of-season awards hadn't met the 65-game mark, not because they were missing games for fun.
Remember Victor Wembanyama last season? In another scary situation, the Spurs announced at the end of last February that he'd miss the rest of the season with deep vein thrombosis. He finished the season with 46 games played, and even then, he should've won Defensive Player of the Year.
Cunningham has played 61 games, but because he played just five minutes on Tuesday due to what the team called back spasms, he's played in only 60 eligible games. You have to play in at least 20 minutes for the game to count toward your eligibility.
Cade Cunningham won't be eligible for All-NBA
This isn't a conversation we should be having.
We are talking about a player who averaged 24.5 points and 9.9 assists per game for the East-leading Pistons, who won't make an All-NBA team, all because of a collapsed lung. Try to make that make sense. Exactly — you can't.
If the NBA isn't going to shorten the 82-game season (and it doesn't seem like that will ever happen), then it needs to change the rule this offseason. That long a season is enough of a strain on your body as is, and every year, the game gets faster. Literally. If you want your top players as healthy as possible for the playoffs, it'd help if they had a little more breathing room during the regular season.
There are too many flaws with the rule to justify keeping it around. We haven't even mentioned the financial incentives tied to honors like making All-NBA, but luckily for Cunningham, he at least got his extra $45 million when he made third team last year. Imagine if that hadn't been the case.
You have to think that the Cunningham news made the league office step back and rethink the rule if they hadn't already. It's far better to trust voters (at least the majority of them) to have the judgment to distinguish the impact of top players beyond the number of games they played.
Cade Cunningham has been a top-15 player this season.