One of my favorite weekends of the whole year is the beginning of the NBA Playoffs. Each series gets its own moment in the spotlight, as all eight game ones go back-to-back-to-back-to-back on Saturday and Sunday. The marathon of playoff games is like Christmas for NBA diehards and there’s a lot to takeaway from the extended viewing.

It’s a time when we confirm our predictions, make new realizations, and altogether overreact to every little thing that happened. There’s still a lot of basketball left to be played in each series and despite what we might think we saw during the first weekend, teams will make adjustments and we’re bound to think something else in a few days.

Even so, I can certainly say I learned a lot this weekend. Here are 10 such things.

1. Home court means nothing, apparently.

Five of the eight road teams pulled out the “upset” victory this weekend, stealing home court advantage away from their adversaries (including three of four on Saturday). We spend so much time placing importance on locking up the right to be the home team in a series and the reality is that the advantage can disappear so quickly, no matter how hard you work for it.

The Pacers have been talking about how much they want that 1 seed since the very beginning of the season and now they don’t even have home court anymore in the first round against the 8-seeded Hawks (more on that in a minute). Sure, the point is to have it for an eventual matchup with the Heat, but who still believes that will happen?

According to NBA Guru's Twitter account, road teams have a record of 5-19 in Game 1 in the first round from 2011-13 and put up a 5-3 record in 2014. On top of that, he/she/it goes on to mention that lower-seeded teams that won Game 1 on the road have gone on to win the series 11 out of 26 times (42.3%) dating back to 2001. An interesting stat, but not one that dooms the teams that lost home court, if they can make the proper adjustments.

2. Paul Pierce is a carnivorous dinosaur.

There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the series between the Raptors and the Nets, in what is becoming an all-out international incident. A Toronto tabloid labeled the series as being the “Raptors vs. Dinosaurs”, referring to how old the Nets’ roster is compared to the Raptors’. Then Raptors GM Masai Ujiri addressed a crowd of thousands of people standing outside the Air Canada Centre in Toronto before their first playoff game in six years and finished his speech by saying something super offensive about Brooklyn (we’re a family site, google it).

Craig Sager suits and then Sager’s son, Craig Sager Jr., took over the regular and unenviable job of interviewing Popovich before the fourth quarter of the Spurs-Mavs game. It was originally supposed to be a taped segment, but Pop insisted that Sager’s son do it live, just like his dad did. Then, in the middle of a hard-fought and serious game, Pop turned to the camera and spoke directly to his long time friend and colleague from the bottom of his heart.

And my living room got mighty dusty. Get well soon, Sager.