The Warriors have one rival in Cleveland and everyone else is chum. That’s a truth the rest of the NBA must live beneath, for at least the next little while. It’s a discomfiting but familiar one to any person not born into a seven-bedroom home: the world hasn’t picked you out as special, life is going to be hard in millions of big and small ways, and you will probably never get a lasting hold on the comfort and contentment you seek. You aren’t exceedingly lucky. You aren’t beautiful and you don’t have that strange brain chemistry miracle where your anxiety levels are always low. There’s a strong chance your best effort will come up short. What’s to be done about this?

If you look up and down the NBA, almost nobody is lousy on purpose. The Mavericks are finally crumbling after years of whiffing on stars in the free agency market and due to Dirk Nowitzki’s sudden, excusable dropoff at the age of 38. The Sixers still inhabit the transitional space between asset farm and actual basketball team, but they’re moving in the right direction. The Magic spent a bunch of money in the offseason, albeit poorly. The Nets don’t own their draft pick, so there’s no incentive for them to be as bad as they are—they’ve simply been byzantinely mismanaged for too long not to suffer. The Timberwolves are struggling to adapt to Tom Thibodeau and vice versa. The Lakers are young and exciting and all over the place.

There aren’t many shameless tankers this season. Perhaps only the Heat and the Suns are hapless by design, and though a few more teams will inevitably join them in futility as general managers scrap their rosters for parts near the trade deadline and encourage their coaches to ease up on chasing victories through the spring months, it’s rare for us to be in the middle of January with so many squads fighting for playoff places. Even if some of them are doomed to lottery-dom, they aren’t playing like they know it yet.

This is unusual because it takes a robust denial of existential dread to play through an NBA season without getting beaten down. It’s exhausting just to watch, at times. Athletes are exceptional doers—they work out for a living, essentially—but you typically see heads start to hang around this time of year, when the basement-dwellers have endured too many blowouts to believe in themselves anymore and the thought of the strings of losses yet to come bring them low. There’s work to be done, always, but it’s done grimly and not as fastidiously as it could be, because the point of it fades in a squall of failure and frustration. There is a way to try without truly trying—it’s the Kings under Vivek Ranadive, the Cavs during the late stage of LeBron’s South Beach interregnum, the Pelicans when they started out 1-and-7 last year—running out the clock seriously and not, looking toward the offseason and hoping something crucial will change.

Splendidly and unexpectedly, this season has been characterized by a jubilant disregard for the facts and nearly the entire league giving themselves over to the joy of figuring out just how good they can be, no matter if that’s good enough. The Raptors are peaking in concert with DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry playing some of the most devastating iso-ball this side of Jordan. The Spurs are, as is their wont, as efficient as they could possibly be. The Bucks figured to fall off after Khris Middleton’s torn hamstring and instead they’re ascending as Giannis Antetokounmpo comes into a fuller possession of his elastic powers. The Rockets have transformed under Mike D’Antoni into a careering parade boat of a team. There are hiccuping squads—the Blazers are a mess, if a sort of salvageable one, and the Knicks are on the verge of cratering after a fine start—but broadly, the NBA is luminously fun: faster than it’s been in years, with a relative dearth of abject franchises and an emerging class of under-25 stars taking on LeBron and Russ and Harden on a night-to-night basis.

This was already clear, but it’s one thing to know it and another to experience it: the regular season is meant to be enjoyed. It’s 82 games not because that’s the precise amount of time it takes to figure playoff seeds or learn Tom Thibodeau’s defensive scheme, but because 82 games makes for six months of basketball during which, each night, there is supposed to be at least one or two interesting contests happening. This is cheap entertainment. Playoff series bear a certain significance and are buttressed by breathy stakes-delineating spoken word intros and black and white photographed highlight packages, but a December tilt between the Hornets and Magic is only worth a damn if it’s pleasing to watch. Context won’t save it—the basketball has to be good and the players have to try hard.

Even in a great year, we don’t get that all the time. 82 games is too much, and the Nets are a scourge, but to surf through League Pass and know that most of what’s on tap features two teams straining bravely toward some goal or another, and that they’re going to be fluidly surging up and down the court, is about as much as you could ask for as a fan.

This can be used as an argument for many things: a shorter season, more incentives for franchises to make the playoffs, that lottery-abolishing draft pick wheel some executives floated a few years back. That’s structural stuff to worry and make a fuss about over the summer. In the meantime, whether it’s anomalous or not, we’re in the midst of a season where only two teams have much of a title shot but the league’s middle class is as vibrant and fascinating as ever. Maybe it’s a happy accident. All that really matters is that it makes us happy.