The Whiteboard: It’s important not to overreact to one NBA game

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The NBA is a funny league in a lot of ways. One of the quirky things about the Association is that it’s relatively easy to make long-term predictions about things that will happen — the Golden State Warriors will probably win the title, Jayson Tatum will probably become a very good player, et cetera — but much more difficult to predict what will happen on a given night.

So many factors, from player health, to where a game takes place, to a hot or cold night, to the schedule setup, plus a million other tiny things, impact every single game in ways that make results hard to predict on a small scale. We know the Warriors will win a lot of games, but it’s really hard to say with confidence where their losses will come in a given season.

Case in point: the staggering Boston Celtics, who had lost seven of their last 10 games, went into Golden State and absolutely walloped the Warriors. Golden State was without Klay Thompson, which gives a clue that the Celtics might have a leg up, but still, Kevin Durant missing 11 of his 16 shots and Gordon Hayward lighting up the Warriors and dropping 30 points after a mostly ho-hum season are two of those little random factors that add some mystery to each and every game.

An even better example: the NBA-leading Milwaukee Bucks lost back-to-back games for the first time all season on Monday, and they also lost to the same team twice this year for the first time. The team able to beat these great Bucks twice was the Phoenix Suns, easily the worst team in the Western Conference. Deandre Ayton defends Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks well, but a lot of teams have Giannis strategies. No others have beaten Milwaukee twice.

Such is life in the NBA. Variance presents a lot of seemingly strange situations that actually are very commonplace. So as fun as it is to get memes and jokes off after a random game result, please keep in mind that any one game doesn’t say much at all in the grand scheme of things.

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