Devin Booker has done enough on the floor to get the Phoenix Suns back into playoff contention in 2025-26, but not enough to qualify for the NBA’s end-of-season awards. Booker was named to his fifth All-Star team in 2026, yet the league’s 65-game threshold rule makes him ineligible for honors such as MVP and All-NBA status this season.
The rule leaves Booker in a familiar kind of spotlight: his production matters, but the awards race cannot include him. He has earned All-NBA recognition twice before in his career, and that history underlines what is being taken off the table now. The Suns, who finished 10 games under.500 and missed the playoffs last season, have flipped the script enough to matter again, even as one of their best players is barred from the year-end conversation.
Before 2023, there was no set criteria for most season-end awards beyond Sixth Man of the Year candidates needing to start fewer than 50 percent of their team’s games. That changed in the new collective bargaining agreement, when the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association agreed to require players to appear in at least 65 regular-season games to be considered for awards such as MVP and All-NBA. The rule was framed as a response to “load management,” a phrase that has become central to the league’s efforts to keep stars on the court more often.
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The policy is now colliding with a different reality. Los Angeles Lakers star Luka Doncic plans to appeal the 65-game rule through an “Extraordinary Circumstances Challenge” after missing time earlier in the 2025-26 season for the birth of his child. The league will delay voting on awards until that appeal is resolved, leaving Booker’s status in the record books untouched for now but also underscoring how the threshold can shape more than one season’s race.
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For Phoenix, the bigger story is the one Booker has already helped write. The Suns are back in contention after a season that ended with no playoffs and a double-digit gap below.500. For Booker, the immediate prize is not another trophy chase but a chance to keep the Suns where they are now — relevant, dangerous and no longer easy to dismiss.
