Report: Donte DiVincenzo Ineligible for Most Improved Player Award

New York Knicks guard Donte DiVincenzo, he of the 283 3-point conversions in a single season, will not be eligible for the Most Improved Player Award this season due to a specific NBA rule regarding game and playing time qualifications.

In case you’re wondering, DiVo appeared in 81 of the 82 games this season, his first one in New York. He started 63 of those 81 games. He averaged 25.4 minutes per game for a total of 2360 minutes throughout the course of the season.

Yet, DiVincenzo didn’t make the shortlist because he didn’t play a tiny 9 seconds more during the last six months. Seriously.

James Herbert of CBS first reported the news on Tuesday, April 16.

“DiVincenzo is not eligible for the Most Improved Player award, under the rules of the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement,” Herbert wrote. “He will not receive a single vote.”

The reason, as Herbert explained, or rather reminded us, is baked into the NBA’s CBA (emphasis mine):

A player must have played in at least (a) 65 Regular Season games, or (b) 62 Regular Season games, suffered a season-ending injury as determined in accordance with the CBA, and prior to suffering such injury had played in at least 85% of his team’s Regular Season games. A player is considered to have played in a Regular Season game for these purposes if he played at least 20 minutes of such game, provided that in respect of no more than two games per Regular Season, a player is considered to have played the game if he played at least 15 and fewer than 20 minutes. A player who failed to meet the games-played requirement may nonetheless be eligible for this award if he prevailed in a challenge to establish his eligibility pursuant to procedures set forth in the CBA.

DiVincenzo is considered to have played 64 games—not the required 65—meeting the criteria highlighted above. He appeared in 62 games in which he logged 20+ minutes, and also in two games in which he logged 15-to-20 minutes.

That missing game? Judging by the NBA’s rulebook, the closest one would be a matchup at Orlando on Dec. 29 in which DiVo logged 19:51 minutes of playing time. Nine more seconds would have sufficed to clinch the magic number of 65 contests meeting the criteria (63 with 20+ minutes and two more with between 15 and 20 MP).

No luck.

The NBA doesn’t round numbers in playing time, which means a player either gets “between more than 15 and fewer than 20 minutes,” or “20 or more minutes.” That’s the black-and-white measurement of the league, and by it, DiVo failed to meet the rules and thus was disqualified for the award.

DiVo was probably not going to win the award anyway, but he was most definitely going to get some votes.

That’s not even the point, though. The thing is, what will the NBA do with this going forward? Will there be changes ahead of next season?

Again, they’re telling the world a man is not eligible for an award simply because he sat on the bench for nine seconds. Not even that he missed it by nine seconds throughout the whole season, but because in a very particular game, he didn’t play that tiny time.

If you take all games that don’t qualify for the criteria (<20 minutes) excluding the two that were used by the NBA to try and help DiVo, he played a total of (not rounding up) 291+ minutes.

But he only played 19:51 against the Magic.

Anyway, fellow Knickerbocker Isaiah Hartenstein also got the axe. So did Jonas Valanciunas (82 games played, all of them in the starting lineup), Terance Mann (75 games starting 71 of them), Derrick Jones Jr. (76 and 66), etc...

Adam Silver, please.