NBA Halloween: Playing trick-or-treat with each team’s early season trend

In the spirit of Halloween, it’s time to play “Trick-or-Treat” with early season trends we’ve seen from each NBA team to determine fluke from reality.

In years past, Halloween represented one of the first few nights of a new NBA season. With recent changes to the schedule moving the start date up a few weeks, it now signals our first chance to take a look at a breakneck start to the 2018-19 campaign and identify a some early season trends.

At this point, most teams haven’t even played 10 percent of their full season yet. What happens in October rarely has any bearing on what happens come playoff time, and because we’re only dealing with 6-8 games, small sample size statistics are running rampant.

However, because NBA basketball is back and we can’t just ignore the evidence that is being provided, these early season trends are still worth examining to determine which are temporary flukes, and which are here to stay for the duration of the upcoming campaign.

Bearing all that in mind, and in the spirit of Halloween, it’s time to take a look at one major trend for each of the 30 NBA teams and play a game called “Trick-or-Treat.” If the observation from the first two weeks is something that can be expected to continue, it’ll be labeled as “treat.” If it’s just downright misleading or unsustainable, it’ll be labeled as “trick.”

Going in alphabetical order, we begin with the Atlanta Hawks and their exhilarating rookie, Trae Young.