(PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images.)
It’s easy to overreact over the team’s first NBA game. For nearly everyone, that’s the only thing that matters. Never mind that it’s a really small sample size in a marathon of a season.
But really, especially for teams that were predicted to be good (hi, Warriors), everything’s going to be okay.
It’s very possible that team ran into a bad match-up. It was a team that could exploit the other team’s weakness over and over and there wasn’t much they could do about it.
It’s very possible the team just had a bad day. Open shots that they would normally make would go clanging off the rim. You probably wouldn’t want that to happen to your favorite team in a crucial game (hi, Rockets) but bad days like that do occur once in a while.
(VIDEO CREDIT: Warner Bros. Records.)
Sometimes, people even lose sight that the loss was close and they just look at the win-loss record because “that’s what matters most.”
The point is that this is just the first game of 82 and possibly more. Teams will have setbacks like this all the time. Everybody loses in the NBA. A lot more teams will lose more than others. That’s how it is. I’m not saying people have to like and accept losing but they have to accept the reality of it.
I’ll use the Lakers as an example because everyone knows they’re my favorite team and that they now have LeBron James so fans feel like they’re invulnerable. They lost to a pretty good team (hi, Blazers) and the damage was mostly done by a castaway lottery pick (whaddup, Nik Stauskas).
But they missed their first 15 three-pointers. They shot 23 percent from behind the arc overall. And they still kept the game relatively close. This was not really supposed to be a lights-out three-point shooting team but 23 percent is definitely not close to the average.
Chances are that this won’t happen in every game. It’ll happen, SOMETIMES, for sure. But it won’t happen 82 times.
So for now, let’s keep calm and move on to Game 2. It’s going to be a loooooooong season.
Rey-Rey is on Twitter at @TheNoLookPass.
His podcast is at Rey-Rey Is Fundamental.