They warn us about it in corporate management training. When evaluating an employee for a performance review, consider the entire body of work, and don’t be too heavily influenced by the things the person did most recently, positive or negative.
The same is true for evaluating NBA playoff series.
Too often, we make sweeping judgements about a series based off of the first game. Like right now, how after game one of Celtics-Magic it looked like the Celtics were about spent. Or after game one of Rockets-Lakers, how it looked like this would be the real big test for the Lakers, and maybe an upset brewing.
Of course, nobody should have been surprised that the Celtics and Lakers won game two. And no one should be too surprised if those two teams manage to win their respective series in 5 or 6 games, without too much more trouble.
Sometimes, even against relatively well-matched teams, game one doesn’t prove anything. It can be no more meaningful than one team having a bad game four on the way to a 4-1 series win.
But there is something about seeing a team in that first game that makes even normally intelligent and reasonable basketball fans lose their sense of perspective. We want to believe that we know what’s going on, and that we have special abilities to predict outcomes based on not only what we’re seeing but how what we’re seeing fits into larger patterns, so we can project current reality into future results.
This gets further exasperated by those times where game 1 tells you exactly how a series will go. Cavs-Hawks this year, for example. Typically, it’s the game 1 against two unevenly matched teams where you can say with some certainty that if the lower-seeded team is over matched, they will not pull off the upset. And it feels pretty certain that these Hawks aren’t beating these Cavs (especially with Horford, Williams, and Joe Johnson injured.)
But then, think about Celtics-Hawks last year. Everyone predicted a Celtics sweep, and the Celtics blew the Hawks out in the first two games. Then, all of a sudden, the Hawks take two in Atlanta and made it a series. No one saw that coming.
This can also happen when there are teams meeting each other while on different trajectories, ascending and descending. The prognosticators in us want to take early results and make conclusions about the ultimate trajectory of the teams we’re seeing. Take last year’s Hornets-Spurs series. The Hornets come out and win the first two games handily. This leads to a lot of “Spurs are done, Hornets are what’s new” stories. The Spurs come back, take it to seven, and win.
So what’s the point of this?
Mostly that everyone who pretends to know with certainty what’s going to happen is only as likely to be right as someone guessing randomly about what’s going to happen. In the NBA playoffs, the thing that you saw most recently is not necessarily a good predictor of things you will see in the future.
Which, you know, is good. Otherwise what would be the point of watching? It’d be no more fun than pressing ‘run’ on some computer simulation that doesn’t even have any cool pictures.
And this is fun. I don’t know what’s going to happen in game 3 of Rockets-Lakers or Celtics-Magic. I don’t know how the Nuggets will play on the road. I’m not even that sure that Atlanta won’t win a game or two at home. And I don’t want to know, until it’s actually happening. I don’t feel like it makes me more or less of a fan to make a prediction early on and then turn out to be right. I don’t care if I’m right. I just care that I’m enjoying it as it happens.
