NBA Halloween: Playing trick-or-treat with each team’s early season trend

In the spirit of Halloween, it’s time to play Trick-or-Treat with one major early season trend for each and every NBA team here in 2019-20.

Every year, thousands of young children go from door to door in their neighborhoods, ringing the doorbell and shouting “Trick-or-Treat!” in the hopes of being rewarded with candy. It’s an odd way to start a conversation where the only socially acceptable result is being served up a treat from a stranger, because at its core, demanding “trick-or-treat” gives the person another, less satisfying option.

Likewise, in the NBA, early season trends can be as fickle as the old Halloween saying should be at face value: Sometimes we see tasty, delectable things early on that will last all season, and sometimes we’re caught off guard by something unexpected, fooled into thinking this is now reality and ultimately tricked when a larger sample size reveals it was just a fluke all along.

Through the first week and change of the 2019-20 NBA season, every team has one or two major storylines that have emerged as prominent talking points. From the Golden State Warriors’ pitiful start to the Phoenix Suns looking like a real basketball team to potential MVP candidates popping up left and right, there’s no definitive knowledge of what’s real and what’s fake, of what’s a treat and what’s a trick.

In the spirit of Halloween, it’s time to take a look at one early season trend for each and every team in the association, ultimately labeling them as either a trick (a fluke that won’t last) or a treat (something we can expect to continue). We begin in alphabetical order with the Atlanta Hawks ….