You seem to not know what a straw man is.
Total losses matters much more than when a team lost. The fact that teams have lost their last game and still made it, and that teams have lost early and still made it, shows you that you can't make a blanket statement like "it's common knowledge that early losses are less significant". As you yourself have admitted, sometimes early losses don't matter much at all. And as you have agreed with, sometimes late losses don't matter at all.
If sometimes early losses don't matter as much and sometimes they do, and sometimes late losses matter a whole lot and other times they don't matter at all, then by definition WHEN you lose isn't really all that important. It's THAT you lost, and WHO you lost to, that matter.