On Thursday, the NBA announced that Los Angeles Lakers star Luka Dončić and Detroit Pistons star Cade Cunningham are now eligible for end-of-season honors. Neither player appeared in the minimum 65 games required, but they both filed “Extraordinary Circumstances” grievances and the league ruled in their favor.
While this is good news for Dončić and Cunningham, it thrusts the NBA’s polarizing 65-game rule back into the spotlight, with many urging the league to make major changes to the rule or get rid of it altogether. Now, NBPA president and Houston Rockets point guard Fred VanVleet is speaking out and making his feelings clear on the controversial rule.
Fred VanVleet Pushes Back Against NBA’s 65-Game Rule and the ‘Narrative’ It’s Based On
VanVleet spoke about the 65-game rule on the NBPA’s “State of the Game” podcast, and he made it clear that the NBPA feels the rule needs to be reevaluated.
“It’s an opportunity to reevaluate the rule itself and what it was born out of and the narrative of load management, as if guys didn’t want to play. I just think it got carried away,” VanVleet explained. “I was with Kawhi [Leonard] in Toronto, where the term ‘load management’ came from, but he had a real situation, a real injury, that he was managing. So it’s not necessarily about guys not wanting to play.
“But I think if we have a voting committee or voting system that can differentiate between guys not playing due to injury and guys resting, they should just be able to slide those guys on a scale. If you look at a guy like Joker (Nikola Jokić), who had a crazy knee injury where people thought we may have lost him for the season, he rushes back and comes back for a month and finishes the season. I think the voting committee should be able to differentiate case-by-case.”
VanVleet later added: “Sometimes it’s not really about the rules and more so how we apply them and who’s in charge of governing those things. I think all of those things can be evaluated going forward. But I know for a fact that the vast majority of the league, guys are trying to play.”
NBPA executive director Andre Iguodala also pointed out that teams are now choosing to sit players who want to play either to tank or develop young players, which also complicates things. Oftentimes, the players take the blame in these situations even if they want to be on the court. The Milwaukee Bucks are the most notable example of this, as they under investigation by the NBA for sitting Giannis Antetokounmpo even though he believed that he was healthy enough to play.
“The other side of it is teams are doing things a lot different than we’ve ever seen before too. You’ve got teams pulling out players and then the public not having a good understanding of guys wanting to be out there but the teams are pulling them out,” Iguodala said. “The NBA has done a great job of being a marketing agency in terms of how they narrate the conversation of who’s at fault. I give Adam Silver a lot of credit. He’s a great lawyer who has a fiduciary responsibility to the governors, AKA owners, of the NBA.”
VanVleet missed the entire 2025-26 season with a torn ACL, but he was elected the new president of NBPA on July 12, 2025, replacing CJ McCollum.
Last season, VanVleet averaged 14.1 points, 5.6 assists, 3.7 rebounds, 1.6 steals, and 2.7 3-pointers, while shooting 37.8% from the field, 34.5% from 3-point range, and 81.0% from the free-throw line.
