For good teams, the NBA regular season is just an appetizer for the main course of the playoffs. Of course, the season matters for playoff positioning. But while they all count the same in the standings, as they say, only by March and April is the finish line close enough that the horse race feels real urgency.
For average and bad teams, only the early part of the regular season feels important. Then, hope is still high for an aspirational burst onto the competitive NBA landscape, perhaps an aspirational playoff run. But by midseason, nearly all of those teams have been proven to be pretenders.