Why is it not fair to note that the team is better with no Jax this year than with him sometimes playing hurt? Sounds like you’re making up the rules after the fact to fit your original statement. Remember that statement? “We have had it laid out before our eyes that we cannot win without Jax.” You said it. It was refutable, and then you decided to change the rules, to ignore this year (when we’ve won more without him than with him) and look only at a small sample last year.

Unfair enough, but if you want to look at last year, you should try thinking about it first.

#1: you’re making a conclusion based on a very, very small sample. This tends to lead to erroneous conclusions from time to time.

#2: if you look at the actual games, in those first 7, the Warriors played 2 games against Utah, a team that had defeated them in the playoffs the year before, a game against Detroit, a perennial contender out of the east, the Mavs, a perennial playoff team out of the west, and Cleveland, the previous season’s runner up. The other loss was to the Clippers. They got spanked twice by Utah and played the other 4 games close. They had one loss to a team that by rights they should have beaten and 5 to teams where a win wasn’t even close to foregone. They weren’t getting run off the court in those 4 non-Utah losses. Things just hadn’t clicked.Yet. And then BEFORE Jax came back, they ran the Clippers off the court and looked like a dominant team.

Now it’s entirely probable that having Jax back helped, but considering him as the lone variable and leaping to the conclusion that he’s so incredibly important as to explain all of the difference is fairly simplistic and, quite probably, just plain wrong. Correlation isn’t always causation and in this case, the correlation isn’t even all that good, as the team started playing real well the game before Jax got back. You have to ignore that to reach the conclusion that “we cannot win without Jax.” You have to ignore this season.

And importantly, you have to ignore that small sample sizes can show goofy things. The Warriors weren’t the only team to lose 6 in a row last year. Houston, a team that finished better than them did so as well. And no, it had nothing to do with any player on Houston’s team being hurt. It happened in their first 13 games as well, with not discernible change in personnel to explain it. Just a rough patch after a very good run. It happens at times.

Of course, none of this is necessarily fair, because it doesn’t support what you initially asserted.