Sixth Man in Basketball: The Bench Role and the Award

John Havlicek played sixteen seasons for the Boston Celtics, won eight championships and scored more points than anyone in the franchise's history. For much of the 1960s he was not in the starting lineup. He sat on the bench for the opening minutes, came in for the first tired starter, and was on the floor when the game was decided. That is the sixth man: the first substitute off the bench, and in the sense American basketball actually uses the phrase, a starter-quality player who gets a starter's minutes without being one of the five who take the opening tip.

The NBA has given an award for the job since the 1982-83 season. The Sixth Man of the Year is chosen by a media panel, the trophy has carried Havlicek's name since 2022, and the only eligibility rule is that a player must come off the bench in more games than he starts. The role itself appears in no rulebook. The NBA's rules say five players per side and unlimited substitutions; who starts and who waits is a coach's decision, and this page is about why a good coach would deliberately make a very good player wait.

What a sixth man is: the first substitute, playing a starter's minutes

Count the players as they enter and the name explains itself. Five start. The next one in is the sixth.

On a bad team that describes whoever happens to be the least weak reserve. On a good one it is a planned role, and the player in it differs from the rest of the bench in ways that are easy to see in a box score. An NBA game is 48 minutes, so a team has 240 minutes of playing time to distribute. Starters commonly play somewhere in the low-to-mid thirties. A typical reserve plays 12 to 20. A true sixth man plays close to 30, sometimes more than one or two of the men who started ahead of him.

	Starter	Sixth man	Other reserves
On the floor at the opening tip	Yes	No	No
When he first enters	Tip-off	Midway through the first quarter	Late first or second quarter
Usual workload	The most minutes on the team	Near a starter's share	A limited share
Who he plays against	Mostly opposing starters	A mix of starters and reserves	Mostly opposing reserves
On the floor to finish close games	Usually	Often	Rarely
Eligible for Sixth Man of the Year	No	Yes	Yes, in theory

The last row matters to the definition. Nothing stops a tenth man from winning the award, but nobody votes for one. In practice "sixth man" and "best reserve" mean the same player.

The substitution rules that make the role possible are generous by the standards of other sports. A substitute reports to the scorer's table, waits for a dead ball and is waved in by an official. He may come out and go back in as many times as the coach likes. Soccer limits changes and forbids re-entry, and baseball removes a player for good once he is replaced. Basketball lets a coach treat his sixth man as a starter who simply begins his night a few minutes late.

The phrase is used the same way in college basketball, where several conferences name a sixth man of the year, and in the WNBA, which has given its own bench award since 2007, now called Sixth Player of the Year. This page deals mainly with the NBA, where the idea was invented and the award has the longest history.

Why a coach keeps a good player on the bench: staggering the scorers

It looks like a mistake. The object is to win, the best five players give the best chance, so the best five should start. Coaches who use a sixth man are rejecting the second step of that argument.

A basketball team does not play its best five for 48 minutes. Players tire, pick up fouls and need rest, and the starters will sit for a combined stretch that adds up to a large part of the game. The question a coach has to answer is what his team looks like during those stretches. If all of his shot creators start together, they will tend to rest together, and for several minutes in each half the team will have five players on the floor and nobody who can make something out of nothing.

Staggering solves it. The coach holds one of his creators out of the starting lineup so that his minutes are offset from the others'. When the starting guard sits, the sixth man is already in and warm. At no point in the 48 minutes is the team without someone who can get a shot.

The second reason: there is one ball

Two players who both need the ball to be effective get in each other's way. Put them on the floor together and one of them spends the possession standing in the corner, which wastes what he does best. Separate them, and each gets a stretch as the offense's first option. The idea of how much of an offense runs through one player is measured by usage rate, covered in our explainer on what usage rate counts and what it hides.

Gregg Popovich's San Antonio Spurs are the standard example. Manu Ginobili was by any measure one of the three best players on teams that won four championships, and for most of his career he did not start. Tony Parker and Tim Duncan opened the game. Ginobili entered midway through the first quarter and took over the second unit, running the offense against the other team's reserves, and then joined the starters to finish.

The third reason: the matchup

A sixth man good enough to start spends part of his night against players who are not. An opposing coach's second unit usually contains his weaker defenders, and a scorer of real quality will produce more efficiently against them than against the first-string stopper he would face from the opening tip.

There are softer reasons too. A bench scorer is insurance when a starter gets into early foul trouble. A veteran may be eased into a reserve role to manage his minutes across an 82-game season. And some coaches simply want a different kind of player on the floor at the start, a defender who sets a tone, and are content to bring the scorer in once the game has settled.

What the role demands: instant offense with no warm-up rhythm

Vinnie Johnson of the Detroit Pistons was called "The Microwave" because he heated up so quickly. The nickname is the best short description of the job anyone has produced.

Think about what the sixth man is asked to do physically. He warms up with the team before the game. Then he sits for player introductions, the national anthem and six or seven minutes of game time interrupted by fouls and a timeout. A quarter of an hour or more may pass between his last warm-up shot and the moment he checks in. Starters ease into a game together. The sixth man enters one that is already at full speed, against opponents who have been running, and is expected to score on his first or second touch.

Three abilities recur in the players who have done it well.

Creating a shot without a play being called. The second unit usually has less structure than the first, because its members practice together less and have fewer set plays. A sixth man has to be able to take the ball, beat a defender off the dribble or come off a ball screen and manufacture a decent look with the shot clock running down. Many of the great ones have been masters of the one-on-one game described in our guide to how isolation plays work.

Shooting without rhythm. Jamal Crawford and Lou Williams, who won the award three times each, could both make difficult jump shots within seconds of entering a game. That is a different skill from making shots after ten minutes of feeling the ball.

Accepting the role. This is the hard one. NBA players are paid, praised and remembered in part for starting, and a player good enough to start has usually done so at every level since childhood. Coming off the bench without resentment requires either a secure ego or a coach persuasive enough to sell the role as an honor. The best sixth men have tended to say the same thing about it: what matters is who is on the floor at the end.

What the role has not traditionally demanded is defense. Many famous sixth men were scorers whose defensive limitations were part of why they did not start, and a coach could hide those limitations more easily against second units. That is a generalization with exceptions, the first award winner among them, but it is a fair description of the type.

Starting versus closing: why the sixth man often finishes games

Red Auerbach, who invented the role in Boston, made the point so often that it has been repeated by coaches ever since: it matters less who starts a game than who finishes it.

The arithmetic supports him. The first five minutes of a game and the last five take the same time on the clock. They are not worth the same. A deficit in the first quarter can be made up over the next forty minutes; a deficit with two minutes left may not be made up at all. Both teams also play differently at the end. Starters who were pacing themselves are now at full effort, defenses tighten, and possessions slow into half-court sets where a team needs someone who can score against a defense that knows what is coming.

The NBA has a formal definition for this period. "Clutch time" in the league's statistics means the last five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime with the score within five points, and since 2022-23 the league has given a Clutch Player of the Year award.

So a coach chooses two lineups. The starting five is partly about balance, routine and matchups at the opening tip. The closing five is simply the five best players available for the situation, and the sixth man is frequently one of them. Ginobili finished games for San Antonio for more than a decade. Havlicek finished them for Boston.

The clearest case

Andre Iguodala did not start a single regular-season game for the Golden State Warriors in 2014-15. He had been a starter for his entire career before that season and agreed to move to the bench. In the NBA Finals against Cleveland, with the Warriors trailing two games to one, coach Steve Kerr put him in the starting lineup for Game 4. Golden State won the next three games and the championship, and Iguodala was voted Finals MVP, the first player to win that award without having started a game during the regular season.

He never won Sixth Man of the Year. His value was mostly defensive, and voters tend to look elsewhere. But no player has illustrated more plainly the difference between where a man is at the opening tip and how much he matters to the result.

There is a cost to closing with the sixth man, and it falls on the starter he replaces. Somebody who heard his name announced before the game watches the last four minutes from the bench. Managing that is part of a coach's job, and it is one reason the arrangement works best on teams whose players trust the man making the decision.

How a rotation is built around the sixth man

No two coaches run identical rotations, and a pattern that holds in November may be gone by March. With that caution, most NBA substitution patterns share an outline, and the sixth man is the piece the rest is arranged around.

1. 1Opening tipThe five starters begin the game and usually play the first six or seven minutes together.
2. 2First changeAround the middle of the first quarter the sixth man replaces a starter, often the one who will lead the bench unit later.
3. 3End of the first quarterTwo or three more reserves enter. The sixth man stays on as the main scorer.
4. 4Start of the second quarterA bench-heavy unit plays, with the sixth man and one staggered starter carrying the offense.
5. 5Middle of the second quarterThe remaining starters return in stages and the deeper reserves sit down.
6. 6End of the halfThe coach's best lineup closes the half. The sixth man is frequently in it.

A typical outline, not a rule. Exact times vary by coach, opponent and foul trouble, and many teams shorten the rotation in the playoffs.

The second half usually repeats the pattern in compressed form, with the difference that the fourth quarter ends with the closing lineup on the floor for as long as the game is in doubt.

Why the first change comes when it does

The timing is tied to the structure of an NBA quarter. Each 12-minute period has mandatory timeouts built in for television, and coaches like to make changes at those stoppages so that nobody has to be pulled during live play. The sixth man's first appearance therefore tends to fall at or near the first timeout of the game. How those breaks fit into the total length of a broadcast is covered in our page on how the NBA's timeouts are allotted.

The starter he replaces is chosen with care. Often it is a player who will come back early, at the start of the second quarter, to anchor the bench unit alongside the sixth man. In other systems it is the starter whose position the sixth man plays, a straight swap.

How deep the rotation goes

An NBA team may carry 15 players on standard contracts, a limit explained in our guide to how many players an NBA roster holds. Far fewer play meaningful minutes. A regular-season rotation is usually nine or ten deep. In the playoffs, with more rest between games and more at stake, most coaches cut it to eight or even seven.

That shortening changes the sixth man's job. In January he may be the leader of a five-man bench unit. In May there is no bench unit, only a sixth and seventh man slotted in among the starters, and he plays nearly all of his minutes with and against first-string players. Some sixth men who thrive in the regular season against reserves are less effective when that happens. The ones who are remembered were not.

How to measure a sixth man: bench scoring, per-36 numbers and the minutes against reserves

Raw averages mislead here more than anywhere. A reserve who scores 15 points a game in 24 minutes is producing at a higher rate than a starter who scores 18 in 36, and a comparison of the two per-game figures gets the answer backward.

The usual correction is the per-36-minute figure, which scales a player's production to a starter's workload:

per-36 value = (total ÷ minutes played) × 36

Fifteen points in 24 minutes works out to 22.5 points per 36. The number does not claim that the player would actually score 22.5 if given 36 minutes. Fatigue and tougher opponents would see to that. It makes two players with different workloads comparable, which is all it is for.

Measure	What it tells you	Its blind spot
Points per game	Raw scoring output	Ignores minutes played and the quality of the opposition
Per-36-minute numbers	Production scaled to a starter's workload	Assumes the rate would hold over longer minutes
Bench points	How much of a team's reserve scoring one player supplies	Depends heavily on how many shots he takes
Usage rate	The share of his team's possessions he ends while on the floor	Says nothing about how efficiently
Plus-minus and on/off	How the team's scoring margin changes with him on the floor	Tangled up with the teammates and opponents he shares the court with
Bench-unit net rating	Points scored and allowed per 100 possessions by reserve lineups	Small samples; lineups change often

The last two rows get closest to the purpose of the role. A sixth man is there to make sure the team does not lose ground when the starters rest, and the direct way to check is to look at the scoreboard during those minutes. If the team is outscored whenever its starters sit, the sixth man is not doing the job, whatever his scoring average. Our guide to reading plus-minus and what it can and cannot show explains the statistic and its noise, and the per-100-possession ratings used for lineups are covered in our piece on offensive and defensive rating.

What voters actually reward

In practice, the Sixth Man of the Year award has usually gone to the reserve with the highest scoring average or something close to it. That is a narrower test than the role deserves. It favors guards who shoot often over forwards who defend, rebound and pass, and it largely ignores whether the points came in minutes that mattered.

The judgment here is that the award measures bench scoring reasonably well and the value of a sixth man only loosely. A reader trying to work out who the best reserve in the league really is should start with on/off numbers and treat points per game as supporting evidence.

The Sixth Man of the Year award: who votes and who is eligible

The NBA first gave the award for the 1982-83 season. The winner was Bobby Jones of the Philadelphia 76ers, a lean defensive forward who averaged fewer than ten points a game and whose team won the championship that spring. It is a small irony that an award now associated with high-scoring guards began with a player known for stopping them.

The rules

They are short.

• Eligibility. A player must have come off the bench in more games than he started during the regular season. A reserve who makes a number of emergency starts remains eligible as long as his games in reserve outnumber them.
• The electorate. A panel of about 100 sportswriters and broadcasters who cover the league, the same kind of panel that decides the NBA's other major individual awards.
• The ballot. Each voter names three players in order.
• The count. Points are awarded for each place, and the player with the highest total wins.

• 5First place
• 3Second place
• 1Third place

The weighting used for the NBA's three-name award ballots. The Most Valuable Player ballot has five places and a different scale.

Voting takes place at the end of the regular season, before the playoffs begin, so nothing a player does in the postseason counts. The five-place ballot used for the league's top individual honor works differently and is described in our guide to how the MVP vote is counted.

One rule that does not apply is worth knowing. Under the collective bargaining agreement that took effect in 2023, players must appear in at least 65 games to be eligible for the Most Valuable Player award, the All-NBA teams and certain other honors. Sixth Man of the Year is not among the awards that provision covers. The details are in our page on the 65-game rule and which awards it governs.

Who has won it most

Jamal Crawford3awards

Lou Williams3awards

Kevin McHale2awards

Ricky Pierce2awards

Detlef Schrempf2awards

Players with two or more awards through the 2024-25 season. The list grows; later seasons are not included.

Show the numbers

Most Sixth Man of the Year awards

Item	Value
Jamal Crawford	3awards
Lou Williams	3awards
Kevin McHale	2awards
Ricky Pierce	2awards
Detlef Schrempf	2awards

A few other entries in the record are worth noting.

Season	Winner	Team	Why it stands out
1982-83	Bobby Jones	Philadelphia 76ers	The first award
1983-84 and 1984-85	Kevin McHale	Boston Celtics	The first player to win twice
1985-86	Bill Walton	Boston Celtics	A former MVP, eight years on
2004-05	Ben Gordon	Chicago Bulls	The first rookie to win
2007-08	Manu Ginobili	San Antonio Spurs	Led his team in scoring as a reserve
2011-12	James Harden	Oklahoma City Thunder	A future MVP
2015-16	Jamal Crawford	Los Angeles Clippers	A third award, at age 36

The John Havlicek Trophy: the name on the award since 2022

For its first four decades the award was a trophy without a name. In December 2022 the NBA redesigned its individual awards and attached a former player to each. The Most Valuable Player now receives the Michael Jordan Trophy, the Defensive Player of the Year the Hakeem Olajuwon Trophy, the Rookie of the Year the Wilt Chamberlain Trophy. The Sixth Man of the Year receives the John Havlicek Trophy.

The choice was not difficult. Havlicek, who died in 2019, is the answer most basketball historians would give if asked who the greatest sixth man was, and he is one of the few players identified with the role who was also among the best players of his generation.

• 16Seasons
• 8Championships
• 13All-Star selections
• 26395Career points

Regular-season career totals, 1962-63 through 1977-78, all with Boston. His points total is the most in the franchise's history.

He arrived in 1962 from Ohio State, where he had played on a national championship team. He was a good enough athlete that the Cleveland Browns drafted him as a wide receiver the same year, though he had not played college football. Auerbach brought him off the bench from the start, and Havlicek did something no reserve had done before: he ran. He never seemed to tire, he cut constantly without the ball, and opposing starters who had been on the floor for eight minutes found themselves chasing a man who had just sat down fresh and did not intend to stop moving.

His most famous play came as a reserve. In Game 7 of the 1965 Eastern Division finals against Philadelphia, with Boston ahead by one point and five seconds left, Havlicek deflected an inbounds pass to a teammate and preserved the win. Johnny Most's radio call, "Havlicek stole the ball," is among the best-known in American sports broadcasting.

By the 1970s he was a starter and the team's leader, and he was the Finals MVP in 1974. That later career is why his name works on the trophy. It says that the sixth man is not a consolation role. The player who defined it was good enough to do anything else.

Where the idea began: Red Auerbach, Frank Ramsey and the Celtics of the 1950s

Frank Ramsey was the first. He joined the Celtics in 1954 from the University of Kentucky, a 6-foot-3 swingman who could play guard or forward, and after a year of military service returned to a team that already had Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman in the backcourt.

Auerbach had a problem that good teams often have, which was more starters than starting places. His solution was to tell Ramsey that he would come off the bench and to present it as a job with its own purpose. Ramsey would enter after the opponent's starters had been running for several minutes, fresh, against tired legs. He would be asked to change the pace of the game. And he would usually be on the floor at the end.

Ramsey accepted it, which was the necessary condition. He won seven championships with Boston between 1957 and 1964 and was later elected to the Hall of Fame, having spent most of his career as a reserve. The NBA did not keep official records of games started in that era, so his exact split is not known. When he was nearing retirement, Havlicek inherited the role and enlarged it.

Why it could only have started there

Two things about those Celtics made the experiment possible. They had more talent than five places could hold, so somebody good was going to sit regardless. And they won, which settled arguments. A player asked to accept a reserve role on a losing team has every reason to think he is being held back. A player asked to do it on a team that wins the championship nearly every spring has a ring to show for it. Boston's run of titles in that period is described in our history of the NBA's great dynasties.

The tradition stayed in the building. When the award was created a generation later, Celtics won three of the first four: Kevin McHale twice, then Bill Walton.

Auerbach's insight was partly tactical and partly psychological. The tactical part, fresh legs against tired ones, any coach could have seen. The psychological part was the invention. He took a demotion and gave it a title, and players have been willing to accept it ever since because Ramsey and Havlicek made it respectable.

The players who made the job famous

Five careers, across four decades, show the different forms the role has taken.

Kevin McHale was a 6-foot-10 forward with the best low-post moves of his era, and for his first five seasons in Boston he came off the bench behind Cedric Maxwell. He won the award in 1983-84 and again in 1984-85. Then the Celtics traded Maxwell for Bill Walton, McHale moved into the starting lineup, and Walton won the next award as his replacement on the bench. McHale is the reminder that a sixth man need not be a guard.

Detlef Schrempf won in 1990-91 and 1991-92 with the Indiana Pacers. A German-born forward who could pass, rebound and shoot from distance, he was closer to a utility player than a scorer, filling whatever the lineup on the floor was missing. He later became an All-Star as a starter.

Manu Ginobili won the award only once, in 2007-08, when he led San Antonio in scoring without being a regular starter and was named to an All-NBA team. He started roughly a third of the regular-season games he played across sixteen seasons. No modern player did more to establish that a team's second- or third-best player could come off the bench by design, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2022.

Jamal Crawford was the first three-time winner: with Atlanta in 2009-10 and with the Los Angeles Clippers in 2013-14 and 2015-16. He was the pure form of the scoring sixth man, a guard with a loose, improvisational handle who could get a shot against anyone. His third award came at 36, which made him the oldest winner to that point.

Lou Williams matched him. Williams won with Toronto in 2014-15 and with the Clippers in 2017-18 and 2018-19, and in March 2019 he passed Dell Curry for the most points scored off the bench in NBA history. He started very few games in a long career.

Set the five side by side and the drift in the role is visible. McHale and Schrempf were forwards who did several things. Crawford and Williams were guards who did one thing extremely well. The award followed the same path, and by the 2010s "sixth man" had come to mean, for most fans, a scoring guard off the bench. The original idea was broader than that.

Sixth men who were also the best in the league: Walton and Harden

Only two players, through the 2024-25 season, have won both the Sixth Man of the Year award and the Most Valuable Player award. They did it in opposite directions.

	Bill Walton	James Harden
MVP season	1977-78	2017-18
MVP team	Portland Trail Blazers	Houston Rockets
Sixth Man season	1985-86	2011-12
Sixth Man team	Boston Celtics	Oklahoma City Thunder
Order	MVP first, sixth man eight years later	Sixth man first, MVP six years later
Position	Center	Guard

Walton: the star who became a reserve

Walton was the best player in basketball for about a season and a half. He led Portland to the 1977 championship and was voted MVP the following year. Then injuries took most of the next seven seasons from him.

By 1985 he was a 32-year-old center who could no longer carry a starter's workload. Boston traded for him to back up Robert Parish and Kevin McHale, and in limited minutes he was superb: a passer and rebounder of the highest class, playing against reserves who had no answer for him. He appeared in 80 games, the most of his career. The Celtics won 67 and the title, and that 1985-86 team is routinely ranked among the best the league has seen.

Harden: the reserve who became a star

Harden's case runs the other way. Oklahoma City drafted him third in 2009 and brought him off the bench behind a starting lineup that already had Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. It was a textbook stagger: Harden ran the offense when one or both of the others rested and joined them to close.

He won the award in 2011-12, a season in which the Thunder reached the NBA Finals. That October he was traded to Houston, where he became a starter, a perennial scoring leader and, in 2017-18, the league's MVP.

The two stories carry the same lesson from different ends. The sixth man's role says nothing reliable about the ceiling of the player in it. Sometimes he is there because his body will no longer let him start. Sometimes he is there because his team has not yet worked out what it has.

The other meaning of the phrase: the home crowd as the sixth man

There is a second sixth man in basketball, and he does not play. The phrase has long been used for the home crowd, on the theory that a loud building is worth an extra player to the team it supports. The Texas A&M football tradition of the "12th Man" is the same idea in a different sport.

Whether a crowd is truly worth a player is hard to isolate. Home teams in the NBA have won more often than visitors in every era on record, but travel, rest and familiarity with the building all contribute to that, and the noise is only one part of it. The phrase is a courtesy more than a measurement, and teams have been happy to extend it.

Two NBA franchises made the compliment official. The Sacramento Kings retired the number 6 in honor of their fans, and the Orlando Magic did the same. Orlando's gesture had one well-known interruption: when Patrick Ewing joined the Magic for the final season of his career in 2001-02, the team let him wear it.

The number has since acquired a different significance across the league. In August 2022, following the death of Bill Russell, the NBA retired 6 for all thirty teams, the first time it had retired a number league-wide. Players who were already wearing it were allowed to keep it for as long as they chose, and nobody new may be issued it. How that decision was made, and how teams handle retired numbers generally, is covered in our guide to who decides which NBA numbers are retired.

So the sixth man is at once a bench role, an award, a trophy with a Celtic's name on it and a way of thanking a crowd, and the number that goes with all of them now belongs to the greatest Celtic of them all. Russell was a starter. He was also the man Ramsey and Havlicek came off the bench to play beside. More guides to American sports and how they work are collected on our United States hub.