No team has even played 10% of its schedule yet, and outlier stretches are inevitable. Case in point: last year's champion, the New York Knicks, had a mostly healthy 2-9 stretch last January that included losses to the tanking Dallas Mavericks and Sacramento Kings. Weird things can happen for a few weeks.
But the first few weeks give us our first taste of who these teams are, and inevitably several will be worse than we expected. We may not have seen enough of a sample at this point to write anyone off completely, but alarm bells are starting to ring in a few notable markets. So let's go through a few of these struggling teams and figure out just how much reason there is to panic after two weeks.
It's easy to forget this now, but New York's championship season started relatively slowly. The Knicks won their first two games, but lost their next three. Mike Brown gave a lengthy and informative monologue about some of their process issues after one of those losses, a road defeat at the hands of the Milwaukee Bucks, and the Knicks righted the ship from there.
And aside from that disastrous January stretch, they were mostly great. It's hard not to look back on that stretch now, as the Knicks limp through a slow start to their title defense. Brown has echoed many of the same criticisms he made last October, most notably the offense's tendency to stand around rather than committing to the all-out motion machine that powered the greatest playoff offense of all time last spring.
Perhaps that style wasn't fully replicable for this group across 82 games. That doesn't mean it can't be summoned again in April. All four Knicks losses have come by single digits.
I'm going to need more than two weeks before I start worrying about Jalen Brunson's team in clutch settings. The Knicks were the fourth-most efficient late-clock shooting team in the NBA this season. They're 28th so far this season.
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