Tracking the first night of the NBA season is pretty straightforward. Every game occupies a single broadcast window. True opening night, in which the bulk of the league debuts, is much harder, but if you're dedicated enough, you can catch up on all of the games by the time the Thursday slate begins.
By the first Monday of the season, however, the volume starts to overwhelm. There are too many games to see everything. That's why we're here to sort through seven days of NBA action with a batch of winners and losers from the opening week of the 2026-27 season.
Who started things off on both the right and wrong foot? As if beating the defending champions on their home floor to spoil ring night wasn't enough, the Philadelphia 76ers proceeded to steal their most famous trick in Game No. 2. When the New York Knicks won their championship against the San Antonio Spurs last June, they did so behind the greatest comeback in playoff history: a 29-point turnaround in Game 4 of the NBA Finals.
Well, the 76ers faced New York's Eastern Conference Finals opponent, the Cleveland Cavaliers, in their second game of the season. They came back from a 29-point deficit and won. There are still kinks to work out, especially defensively.
There's some stylistic clash here between Joel Embiid's glacial movement and the turbo boosters everyone else on this team seems to play with. But we're already seeing a lot of the ways that the sheer accumulation of talent can manifest into easy points. Take this play from the Cleveland comeback.
It's a Tyrese Maxey-LeBron James two-man action in which Maxey slips and Sam Merrill shows. That split second gives the fastest player in the NBA a runway to the basket, but watch the help defenders. Donovan Mitchell can't leave Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.
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