In the moment, losses like Wednesday’s feel seismic. The Lakers blowing a 26-point lead to a Thunder team that will almost certainly finish near the top of the lottery standings is a bad loss, no matter how early in the season it came.
But as the saying goes, sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees. I’ve covered multiple NBA teams in recent years, some of them good, most of them bad. But the common theme is that each one of them has ugly losses. It may not be in the form of blowing a 26-point lead, but each year, every team has games they need to flush.