Why do we watch the first three quarters?

Although this article is about the flurry of improbable comebacks this postseason, this was edited before the most improbable of all - Pacers beating the Knicks, down 14 with 2 minutes left. As a Knicks fan, I still haven’t processed the calamity.

My love for sports began with my grandfather. Growing up in Brooklyn, he was a Dodgers fan but after their move to Los Angeles, he adopted the Mets. Baseball was easily his favorite sport, but in maintaining a year-long bond with his two sons, he branched off into the other major sports - adopting the Giants, Rangers, and perhaps lastly the Knicks. 

Despite watching the star studded 70s Knicks, featuring a Hall of Fame lineup that produced two titles, my grandfather’s relationship with the Knicks was his least heralded. 

He couldn’t get enamored by a sport whose game flow was too inconsistent and too streaky. As he once pointed out, basketball is unlike other sports because it involves benching your top players throughout the game. In baseball and football, starters play against each other, and in hockey the different lines play evenly. Yet once a basketball team piece-mealed its starters, mismatches made the scoreboard fluctuate, giving him a false sense of which team has the advantage to win the game.

He best summed up that the sport was a game of runs and the games’ 48 minute duration was too long for the theatrics of a run. 

Amidst my grandfathers’ pantheon of sports truisms - which included his Berra-inspired “It ain’t over til it’s over” or “baseball is a game of inches” - his most memorable one was specific to basketball. 

“It’s the only sport where you only need to watch the final few minutes.”

There’s no better example than the 2025 NBA Postseason to support his point.

For the casual sports fan, hearing an iteration of just watch the end of the game isn’t uncommon. Fans clamor for the shortening of baseball games and faster pace of play in golf, so they might agree that professional leagues’ games should just cut to the chase.

But with the NBA there’s a lot of “noise” in the early stages, teasing you as if a team’s 10-0 first quarter run or 17-2 run to end the first half is a harbinger for a team’s desired outcome. It’s not. 

Unlike other sports, what fans consider a large lead in basketball rarely sustains. A blown 14 point first quarter lead is not part of the game’s story the way a blown 2 goal lead in soccer would. 

As a massive sports fan, it’s bizarre for me to question the purpose of watching a sporting event from start to finish. 

The NBA, especially, is a star driven league and people love immersing themselves in stardom. Fans can’t get enough of watching superstars do superstar things, so they do so from start to finish. Want to watch Steph Curry or Nikola Jokic go off for 40? Well, don’t miss the 8 points they scored in the first quarter? God forbid you miss a Jalen Brunson ankle-breaking crossover or a Draymond Green ejection. For those that want to consume everything related to the spectacle of stardom - great! 

Another reason to watch an NBA game from opening tip-off is if you’re attending. If you want a thorough social evening with the boys or your family, maximize your investment and arrive at the game early. Get your money's worth. 

Speaking of money, another reason to watch an NBA first half is because of betting. As Adam Silver has alluded in interviews, legalized gambling sites encourage fans to watch aspects of basketball they traditionally haven’t. People are now watching trivial aspects like the play of bench players and purgatory teams like the Charlotte Hornets and Washington Wizards, which therefore means more eyeballs on the games’ early stages.  

Otherwise, there is little need to watch the majority of an NBA game. 

This prelude brings me to why I’m opining about the futility of watching NBA games from the beginning. 

This recent NBA Semifinals matchups have featured unconscionable comebacks. 

The Thunder, Cavs, and Celtics (twice) all had leads large enough to give them a 98% or 99% chance of winning the game. Yet in each of those games, they lost on the final play.

The Knicks, having won Game 1 trailing by 20, copycatted their opening performance in Game 2. Once again down an even 20, and down 16 points mid-way through the final quarter, they completed a furious comeback after defending the Celtics last gasp at victory. 

These road team underdog upsets have created a frenzy around the league, with many deeming this postseason one of the most chaotic in an otherwise orderly postseason history. 

Since 1984, when the NBA changed its playoff format to feature 16 teams, every NBA champion but one has been a Top 3 seed. Since 1984, 36 of 40 champions have adhered to Phil Jackson’s “40/20 rule”, meaning that in the regular season they won 40 games before losing 20 games. So when you see 4 seeds (Pacers/Nuggets) win and 40/20 teams (Celtics/Thunder/Cavs) lose, especially in calamitous fashion, it can reframe your opinion about NBA postseason competition. 

Die-hard NBA fans will argue that you should watch the full game to get the essence of the game’s narrative. If a team is up by 20 and holds onto it, the early lead represents the team’s undisputed dominance. Even during the intermission of Knicks-Celtics Game 1, when the Celtics were up by 16, Charles Barkley said “I don’t know how New York can win four games against Boston”.  But no matter the thousand plus games Chuck played or the thousands more he’s watched, he still couldn’t acknowledge that a 16 point halftime lead is nothing. 

The Knicks’ comebacks weren’t isolated event.

In Game 2 between Indiana and Cleveland, the Pacers were down 20 midway in the 3rd as well.

The Nuggets were down 11 to the Thunder with 2:30 remaining .  

Although some might say these improbable comebacks aren’t the norm and just on the forefront of everyone’s mind because these instances happened within three nights of each other, there were still 58 regular season games in which a team lost holding an 18+ point lead. 

In a sport where each team receives a smidge over 100 possessions (NFL teams average nearly 12 possessions, MLB teams have 38 plate appearances), there is much more opportunity for a team to go hot, an opponent to go cold, and for both to occur concurrently. 

Another reason for this variance is due to different point-scoring option. Just like in skeeball, where you can go for 40 points or 100, a team can cut into a deficit with 3’s rather than the 2’s with which they may have settled earlier on. This “scoring buffet” doesn’t occur in baseball, where a team can willingly attempt to cut a large deficit with a grand slam. 

But in basketball, convert three 3’s in a minute and your 9-0 run can cut a seemingly insurmountable lead in half.

Here’s an excerpt from a 2024 ESPN article:

 “The frequency of 10-point and 15-point comebacks has increased as well. In 1997-98, teams that fell behind by double digits had an .181 winning percentage. That climbed to .250 a season ago and is at .229 this season, meaning nearly one in every four games in which a team takes a double-digit lead ends with the other team winning.”

Considering that the ‘98 league leader in threes (20.4 attempts)  would be a standard deviation from the bottom today (31.9 attempts), these comebacks are strongly correlated to the three point revolution. 

As my grandfather warned me, there’s something about the length of a basketball game in which fatigue and “second wind” conditioning contribute to this Jekyll-Hyde streakiness. It’s the only major sport where a coach will call a timeout, not necessarily for personnel changes or clock preservation, but because his gassed players need rest.

Perhaps I’m more attuned to the fragility of a large lead, because I’m a Knicks fan and have been twice tempted to turn off the game with them down 20. After all, they’re playing the NBA Champions. 

But while these comebacks are more perceptible in basketball - because of the large scoring size - than in other sports, we’re still enthralled that these comebacks could happen on a stage when the stakes are highest. 

Perhaps my grandfather was right, you only need to watch the fourth quarter or final minutes of an NBA game.