“Basketball is a game of runs.” Anyone with even a passing familiarity with basketball has heard the phrase.
But when parsed literally, the idiom sort of falls apart. Of course basketball is a game of runs — if it were not so, the two teams would just alternate baskets and whoever took the final shot would win. To be fair, most people who use the phrase mean something more like, “You can expect each team to put together at least a few good stretches of play.”
By that slightly altered definition, there may be no better example that proves the rule than Washington’s 109-101 loss to the Indiana Pacers on Monday night.