In the NBA's almost 80 year long history there has been 945 All-NBA awards given out. With the season over halfway done it is soon time to think about this year's All-NBA awards. With the new rules, only players who have played at least 65 games will be considered. This raises the question, is this arbitrary mark unfair to the players? To shine a light on this, let's look at all the players who made an All-NBA team without playing at least 65 games.
Out of the 945 awards, 134 of them were given to players who played less than 65 games. However, many of these were given during seasons with fewer than 82 games. The 82 game season was first implemented in the 1967-68 season and there has since been 4 seasons where teams played fewer games than that. They were:
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The 1998-99 season which had 50 games
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The 2011-12 season which had 66 games
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The 2019-20 season which had 63-75 games
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The 2020-21 season which had 72 games
In order to hit 65 games in an 82 game season, an NBA player must play 79.27% of their games. Out of the previously mentioned 134 awards which were given to players who played less than 65 games, only 54 of them actually played less than 79.27% (equal to 65 games) of their teams’ games. Fun fact: 2 of these 54 players were only ~0.1% away from making the threshold (Westbrook and Kawhi in 2019-20).
Of all the players given the All-NBA nod for seasons equaling less than 65 games played, LeBron and Shaq are leading the line with 4 awards each. Jerry West, Jimmy Butler, Joel Embiid, Steph Curry, Kawhi Leonard and Yao Ming share the second spot with 3 each.
Fun fact 2: Yao Ming in 2006-07 (58.5%), Gus Johnson in 1965-66 (51.3%) and Scottie Pippen in 1997-98 (53.7%) are the only players to make an All-NBA team whilst playing less than 60.0% of their teams' games.
So, to summarize, only 5.714% of all All-NBA awards that have ever been given, have been given to players who played less than what equates to 65 games in an 82 game season. From this it seems to be quite a fair metric to have for All-NBA. What do you think?
Link to spreadsheet with data:
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