Thursday NBA Injury News is a Boost to Jaylen Brown's All-NBA Candidacy

Jaylen Brown is having an All-NBA season for the Boston Celtics. He’s averaging 28.8 points, seven rebounds, and 5.3 assists, all of which are career-highs. He has a chance to score 2,000 points in a season for the first time in his career. And most importantly, he has been the top option on a surprising 51-win team a few games away from clinching the second seed in the Eastern Conference.

The only question is really whether Brown will get a first, second, or third team nod. There is still some debate over where he’ll land, but some important injury news revealed on Thursday night could make it much less of a discussion.

Timberwolves superstar Anthony Edwards was ruled out of Minnesota’s game in Detroit with a knee injury and an illness. That means he won’t reach the 65-game threshold to qualify for postseason awards. At the same time, Pistons MVP candidate Cade Cunningham was reevaluated after suffering a collapsed lung and was ruled out for another week. That means he won’t make the 65-game cutoff either.

That removes two prime candidates in the first-team debate with Brown. Four first-teamers are locks: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, and Victor Wembanyama, but the 65-game rule might throw that into disarray, too.

Jokic has played 61 of Denver’s 77 games, so he still needs to play in four of the final five Nuggets games to qualify. Wembanyama has also played in 61 games, but San Antonio has six more games to play so Wemby can miss two more games and still make it. Doncic left his 64th game of the season with a hamstring strain, and is at risk of missing the rest of the regular season and being disqualified from the awards. Gilgeous-Alexander has played in 64 games, so he just needs one more to officially qualify.

Brown is in the next tier of players with Edwards, Cunningham, Donovan Mitchell, Jalen Brunson, Kawhi Leonard, and a few others. Whether he’s at the top, middle, or bottom of that group is a matter of personal preference. As much as everyone in Boston has seen Brown have an incredible season, there are some advanced stats that are less impressive than others.

But the 65-game rule has changed things, leading to a lot of pushback against it. Doncic, for example, has proven everything he needs to prove this season. It’s fair to say that missing the last five games shouldn’t change his standing in the league. However, the league set the rule to prevent excessive load management, and the 65 games was a negotiated number with the Player’s Association.

“I generally think it’s worked,” Commissioner Adam Silver recently said. “That, along with the player participation policy, there is not nearly as much discussion about load management as there was, in part because the teams and players have responded. You see them on the floor now.”

Even Brown recognizes that a lot of the complaints about the 65-game rule is because of situations like Cunningham or Doncic are on the cusp and on the verge of being disqualified.

“It's funny because people, once again, they move the bar,” he said in a recent live stream. “When it first became a 65-game rule, everyone was in support of it because, at the time, people was talking about guys who were … load managing.”

Brown said he’s open to moving the criteria to 62 or 60. The players could try to take it to the league after the season to reopen the discussions. Some of that might hinge on who makes All-NBA because of the rule. If a worst-case scenario hits and three of those four locks miss out, the third team will be full of some interesting names. One of those names could become an unfortunate poster boy for changing the rule.

For now, Brown could stand to benefit from the rule and become one of the first-team locks. It doesn't matter much outside of bragging rights because Brown has already gotten his super-max contract. When the Hall of Fame comes calling, they’ll just total up how many times he made an All-NBA team rather than breaking it down into tiers.

But bragging rights count for a lot in the NBA. So as unfortunate as the injury news is around the league, and as much everyone involved would prefer everyone be healthy, Brown looks to be close to locking up his first-ever All-NBA First Team spot.