Once upon a time, the NBA exhibition season was eight games. When players were suspended or pay was pro-rated in some way (say for a 10-day contract), the salary was divided over 90 games, not the 82-game regular season schedule.
While eight games isn’t much, it weirdly provided a surprising amount of information about what was to come in the regular season. For example, for established good teams, the preseason meant basically nothing. They could go 0-8 and still roll in the regular season. In practice, better teams didn’t crater in preseason — they were usually measurably better than opponents, even while not going full bore.
For up-and-coming teams, performance in exhibition games provided a decent barometer on team quality. If they played well in preseason action, they tended to play similarly well in the regular season. If they were bad, they tended to be similarly bad in the real games.
This year — I assume specifically to annoy me and make useless my habit of running statistical analysis on small sample size events like summer league, international tournaments, and preseason games — the Wizards played just three exhibition games to “prepare” for the 2025-26 season.
Yes, I know reducing the preseason schedule was a smart move to trim the length of the schedule, try to reduce the number of injuries, and get more quickly to the games people actually want to see. Me included.
The numbers don’t mean much, so I’ll share a few impressions amalgamated from the three games they played:
Hopefully, Bub Carrington makes a quick return from a “sore knee” that kept him out of much of last night’s game.
Next up: My annual forecast.