The Adelaide 36ers beat The Phoenix Suns and the world will never be the same.

Photo Credit: (Getty Images/NBAE: Barry Gossage)

Ah, the preseason. An underrated period of the NBA season. A time of hopeful experimentation for some teams and for others a time of premature panic and overreactions. As an international NBA fan myself, one of my favourite parts of the preseason is when an NBA team risks it all and plays a representative from the NBL or Euro league etc. It's fun to route for the ultimate underdog.

In the above image you can see DeAndre Ayton battling in the post against my high school science teacher. All disrespect aside, that man is the NBL's all time leading point scorer. The Australian Kareem. I didn't know that and I doubt DeAndre Ayton knew it either.

It is a funny aspect of these exhibition games, for one team it is quite possibly the biggest stage they'll play on all year, for the other it's literally the preseason and they each play like it. Chris Paul wasn't sitting in the locker room before the game thinking "I'm gonna show the world how great I am". I guarantee there was more than one 36er was thinking that.

The discrepancy in talent and celebrity between the teams lowers the pressure IF the NBA team is winning. And thats a big if. The stakes for NBA teams in these games seem higher than the NBA finals. Especially in the Twitter era, the risk to reward ratio makes it almost not worth it.

So, the Suns lost and the everyone is loosing their minds. "This is going to be the biggest fall off in NBA history","The Suns are the new 2014 Pacers", "How will Robert Sarver sell now?". Complete insanity. What is true is that the Suns should expect this fan behaviour and judgement. They rolled out their full strength lineup and lost to a team that is sponsored by 2k and isn't even in the game. Ayton genuinely had no answer for Daniel Johnson (Australian Kareem) and Chris Paul was scoreless for much of the game. Perhaps the Suns assumed they would win in the end and it just got out of hand.

Imagine the score was the inverse:

Phoenix Suns - 134 Adelaide 36ers -124

It would result in minimal, if any discourse surrounding the game. There would be generic ABC articles talking about what a great opportunity this was for Adelaide (Australia's second worst major city). Maybe a little bit of Jock Landale content. But not much more than that.

Instead we got a whirlwind of anti-suns bias that has been common ever since the 2020 finals. Pardon my metaphor, but it's like If I beat Roger Federer clean and he didn't even return my serve. Is he still the greatest? should we still respect him? despite all his grand slams and accomplishments, I think that if he lost to me, his spot at the top would be in question. It's preposterous to say that I am to tennis, what the Adelaide 36ers are to basketball, however I can at least build myself in a tennis video game. It is more preposterous to compare the suns to Federer. But you get what I mean.

I don't know how much more the Suns can take. Sarver, Crowder and now this.

It's not usual by the way. NBA teams are currently 138 - 17 against International opponents since exhibition games began in 1978. Adelaide is the first NBL team to pick up a win. This preseason has 2 more games of this type scheduled, including 36ers vs OKC on October 6.