In what order does execution on WHERE and ON clauses work?

Question

I was reading this page about APPLY:

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/alexander_kuznetsov/archive/2009/07/07/using-cross-apply-to-optimize-joins-on-between-conditions.aspx

Answer 1

A massive amount of logic, time, blood, sweat, and tears have gone into the SQL Server Engine Optimizer, which is what determines the query plan that determines how a statement is actually processed. What is written in a statement in no way reflects what actually executes in the engine.

To really see what's going on, run your queries with the show actual query plan option enabled. My guess is that based on the additional where clause the data is being pre-filtered by the optimizer.