Biggest Overreactions from First 2 Months of the NBA Season

The NBA season is long.

And while two months of action may give us enough information to make educated takes, it's far from sufficient for definitive ones.

A lot can change between now and the end of the campaign. A lot could change in the next week. That means some of the bigger overreactions we've seen to date could be proven wrong.

And it's those takes that will be the subject of today's piece.

The MVP buzz surrounding Jayson Tatum makes sense. His Boston Celtics have had the best record in the league for much of the season, and he's undoubtedly their best player.

For plenty, the "best player on the best team" analysis is the beginning and end of the MVP conversation.

In fact, it seems to have been the deciding factor for a number of likely voters polled in ESPN's regular straw poll.

Tatum won the first round fairly comfortably (Tim Bontemps will run this exercise two more times this season), despite having a weaker statistical résumé than a handful of players. He's nowhere near the two-time reigning MVP in Basketball Reference's MVP Tracker ("based on a model built using previous voting results").

On top of that, the driving force behind Tatum's candidacy, Boston's record, is already slowing down.

At plus-6.6, the Celtics lead the league in net rating, but they're only half a point ahead of the Cleveland Cavaliers and aren't anywhere near the kind of marks typically put up by legitimate juggernauts. A handful of teams are narrowing Boston's lead in the standings too.

There's more than enough time for Luka Dončić, the three big men who've dominated this conversation in recent years (Nikola Jokić, Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo), Zion Williamson or some other surprise entrant to the race to win the award.

It would've been pretty easy to count the Golden State Warriors out of the playoff chase as soon as it was reported that Stephen Curry would be out for a "few weeks" without a shoulder injury.

They've been terrible without their best player this season, and that's a trend that extends back long before Kevin Durant arrived, continued while KD was in the Bay and remains true now.

Since the start of the 2013-14 season through today, the Warriors are plus-12.4 points per 100 possessions with Curry on the floor and minus-3.0 without him.

But the Warriors showed more than signs of life on Sunday when they crushed the Toronto Raptors on the road 126-110 behind 43 points from Jordan Poole.

Granted, Toronto's in the middle of its own slide, which has to be concerning for Raptors fans, but this result reflected Golden State's finish in 2021-22.

Curry missed the last 12 games of that season with an injury, and his teammates managed to go 6-6 in that stretch without him. And that included a five-game winning streak.

There is plenty of pride on this roster. Poole, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson are all champions who were never going to just lay down without Curry. They're capable of treading water till he returns. And with the level of parity in the league right now, that's probably good enough.

The Minnesota Timberwolves and Atlanta Hawks gave up massive trade packages to land Rudy Gobert and Dejounte Murray, respectively.

And both deals (especially Minnesota's) came with a lot of concern about how the incoming players would fit alongside the incumbent stars.

Trae Young and Murray both need the ball in their hands to be effective. And in a league that has emphasized versatility and wings in recent years, Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns are both indisputably centers.

Through two months, those concerns haven proven warranted.

The Timberwolves are minus-1.0 points per 100 possessions with Gobert and KAT on the floor, per Cleaning the Glass. That mark is particularly concerning since the former hasn't had a negative individual net rating since his rookie season in 2013-14.

And while the Hawks are a solid plus-4.4 points per 100 possessions with Young and Murray, the team has hovered around .500 all season, and Young's field-goal percentage and three-point percentage have plummeted from their 2021-22 levels.

We always should've expected adjustment periods for these teams, though. Young hasn't had to cede much (if any) playmaking responsibility in his career. Gobert has played in a system for nearly a decade that was built with his strengths in mind: lots of pick-and-roll on offense and lots of filtering to the paint on defense.

It'll take some time for those two, as well as their new teammates, to adapt.

Of course, there's a chance they never do. Right now, that's the easier take to hitch your wagon to. But two months simply isn't enough time to know for certain that these experiments won't work.

Thinking you know who'll win the 2023 NBA title seems foolish, at best.

There's a level of parity in the league right now that we've rarely seen throughout its history. The aforementioned Playoff Probabilities Report gives 12 teams a two-percent-or-better shot to win the championship. Ditto for FiveThirtyEight's projection system.

If this keeps up until the playoffs—and the depth of talent throughout the NBA suggests it will—several first-round series will feel like coin flips. And depending on what side of the coin lands up, each team's path could get significantly easier (or trickier).

Long gone are the days of the dynastic Golden State Warriors with Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, when Finals participants seemed set in stone before a single game was played.

The fans are the beneficiaries of all that parity and the talent pool that generated it.