Winners and losers of NBA's first week: Giannis' Heat are ice cold, OKC injuries and new-look wonders

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? Let's dive in. Winner: Philadelphia 76ersThe star-studded starting five looks good, and they spoiled ring nightAs 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. Jaylon Tyson offers a half-hearted dig, but he's not going to leave Jaylen Brown. In theory, Evan Mobley should be the one rotating to the basket... except he's guarding Joel Embiid, so by the time he decides to help, Maxey is already gone. Help defense is a very instinctual trait. Putting this much talent on the floor creates hesitation. Nobody wants to leave an All-Star. What do you do when there are All-Stars everywhere? The Sixers just have so many distinct forms of advantage creation with this star power that they're going to be enormously difficult to defend. Brown is sealing a mismatch in the post? Sorry, can't help, I'm watching Anfernee Simons in the corner. Want to blitz Maxey in a pick-and-roll? Great, now James has a 4-on-3. The Sixers, off to a 3-1 start, torture teams into and out of these difficult, split-second decisions, and it's already paying off big time. Loser: Oklahoma City ThunderOKC had to major injury blows in one nightHas a single championship contender ever lost as much to injury in the first week of a season as the Thunder just did? Jalen Williams is likely out for the year with a dislocated ankle and a fractured fibula. Cason Wallace may be out for the year with a torn labrum. And then, on Monday, Alex Caruso left a win over the Phoenix Suns with a sprained ankle. With Lu Dort gone, the Thunder went from the greatest surplus of All-Defense-caliber wings in NBA history to running out of them practically overnight. Having Ajay Mitchell and Jared McCain eases the offensive loss created by Williams' absence, but neither has ever even been a full-time starter. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has never had a greater burden on his shoulders. If he doesn't maintain and perhaps improve upon his MVP-caliber play, Oklahoma City's championship bid is on life support. Chet Holmgren isn't a luxury anymore. He can't disappear against Victor Wembanyama or pick his spots offensively. Those two stars are about to learn what normal NBA depth looks like rather than the embarrassment of riches they've spent their careers with. What Jalen Williams and Cason Wallace injuries mean for the Thunder and why a trade isn't so simple Sam Quinn The Thunder can improve through trade if they want to, but given the typical trade season schedule, reinforcements are months away. Their margin for error is now gone. It's only October, and the Thunder can suddenly no longer afford any further injuries. Oklahoma City looked like the heavy championship favorite when it clobbered San Antonio on opening night. By the end of opening week, the entire championship landscape has shifted. Winner: Minnesota TimberwolvesLaMelo and Ant make up the NBA's most fun team (so far)Chris Finch said before the season that the Timberwolves had "traded moodiness for giddiness" in acquiring LaMelo Ball. Well, no team's attitude adjustment has been more evident early in the season than Minnesota's. No team is loving life quite as much as the Timberwolves to kick off the season. Ball is soft-launching new celebrations. Jaden McDaniels is stomping out imaginary cigarettes. This is the NBA's most fun team through a week.That was the basic idea with the Ball acquisition. The Timberwolves have been a physical, grind-it-out team for the past few seasons, but the entire theory of their team shifted with that trade. This is now a roster built around two of the NBA's best pull-up shooters and the gravity their presence creates. You can no longer double Edwards with impunity because Ball's playmaking destroys mismatches, yet if you don't blitz Edwards off of screens, he's still one of the NBA's most lethal drivers and will simply beat you at the rim. Put all of this together and the Timberwolves have the NBA's sixth-ranked offense through four games while Edwards has already reached 45 points twice.The defense is a work in progress, the shooting outside of Ball and Edwards is hit or miss, and they're turning the ball over a bit too much, but those are rough edges Minnesota can sand down over the course of the season. For now, the revamp is working wonders, and Edwards is playing perhaps the best basketball of his career. Loser: Giannis AntetokounmpoThe Greek Freak's Miami era is not off to the best startGiannis Antetokounmpo prioritized two teams in his trade request from Milwaukee. One made quite a bit of sense: the Boston Celtics, a team with another prime-aged superstar in Jayson Tatum, loads of shooting and a proven regular-season formula. The other was seemingly based more on weather and reputation: the Miami Heat, a Play-In team four years running. Their best player, like Antetokounmpo, was another big man in Bam Adebayo. They had minimal shooting and creation left over, and they had to give up almost everything they had of value to complete the deal without including Adebayo. Naturally, that led to preseason concerns and most of them have thus far manifested as Miami is off to an 0-4 start. There are shooters here and there are defenders here, but there isn't nearly enough overlap between the two. Klay Thompson is getting picked on mercilessly defensively. Tim Hardaway Jr. started the season cold. So have Pelle Larsson and Andrew Wiggins. The notion of building an offense around two big men as your shot creators has thus far proven difficult. What is Antetokounmpo supposed to do when Adebayo works near the rim? Antetokounmpo himself has been excellent. He's excelling in Miami's fast-paced system and still looks like an MVP candidate, at least offensively. His roster can't say the same. The Heat have a better supporting cast than the Milwaukee Bucks did toward the end, but they're not close to the teams he contended with, nor do they appear all that competitive with the best teams the Eastern Conference has to offer now. Miami has very limited flexibility to improve with, and considering his age and recent history of calf injuries, it's not as though Antetokounmpo should be eager to wait out a multi-year build. Remember... Antetokounmpo chose this. This is the team he wanted. Maybe he'll be rewarded for that faith as the season progresses. Maybe Pat Riley pulls another shot creator out of his hat. But if this is what the Heat are going to look like, it's worth wondering how worthwhile all of the drama surrounding his exit from Milwaukee really was. Winner: Walker Kessler'Milk Chamberlain' is fitting in perfectly with Luka and the LakersThe official record for dunks in a season is 308, held by Rudy Gobert. Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves, but through three games, Walker Kessler was on pace to dunk 410 times. He's not going to keep dunking five times per game, he's not going to play in all 82 games and he will eventually run into an opponent with some actual size, but Kessler is enjoying one of the biggest teammate-induced glow-ups in recent NBA history.Kessler spent his whole rookie contract playing on a tanking team. His best point guard was probably Mike Conley in his age-35 season. Now he's paired with the greatest lob passer in NBA history in Luka Dončić and another star-level creator in Austin Reaves. No center in the NBA has an easier job offensively than Kessler does right now. We'll be litigating the decision the Lakers made to trade most of their draft capital for Kessler for years. If they don't have enough on the wing to win a title, they have pretty limited means to change that, largely because they have Kessler. But that's a Lakers question. The trade was an undeniable victory for Kessler, who's in the best imaginable circumstances for a player with his skill set. Loser: Stephen CurryIt's already looking like a wasted season for one of the best players of all-timeHere's how Stephen Curry reacted at media day when he was informed that the Golden State Warriors weren't expected to make the playoffs. Like most of the best jokes, it was funny because it was true. Curry has spent more than a decade genuinely competing at the highest levels of the sport. Merely having him gave the Warriors meaningful championship equity. That window probably closed the moment Jimmy Butler tore his ACL, and Golden State's failure to add LeBron or any meaningful veteran talent this offseason more or less confirmed that. Still, this is Stephen Curry. We at least assumed the final years of his career would end with some dignity.So far, that hasn't been the case. The Lakers mopped the floor with the Warriors on opening night, and then Golden State blew a 12-point lead in the last four minutes against Memphis in their follow-up. The defense ranked 29th entering Monday's game, with Steve Kerr calling out rookie Yaxel Lendeborg, who is already picking fits with Dončić, for his performance specifically. Lendeborg and Brandin Podziemski are the only Warriors besides Curry offering much of anything offensively. This probably suits the Warriors themselves just fine. They'll sell out every game because Curry is on the team and they'll probably walk away from this season with the best odds in the newly reformed lottery because having Curry means they'll likely avoid the relegation zone. But everyone else here ensures they don't have a postseason future.It's looking like a sad, wasted season for Curry, who doesn't have too many of them left. Winner: Ty JeromeWho had a Ty Jerome 45-point game on their opening night bingo card?Ty Jerome playing at an All-Star level? Actually, not that surprising. He won't make more runners than anyone else in the league has even attempted as he has thus far... but he's still among the league's best at that particular shot. He won't make more than half of his 3s, but he's a career 39% 3-point shooter, so odds are he'll still make plenty. He had the NBA's eighth-highest offensive Estimated Plus-Minus a year ago, and he ranked 28th on that front in his breakout 2024-25 season for the Cavaliers. On a per-minute basis, Jerome's impact has always been enormous. But Jerome handling an All-Star's workload? That's new. Entering this season, Jerome had played 30 or more minutes in just 11 regular-season games. He has now done so in all four Grizzlies games this season, and he just played in both halves of a back-to-back on Sunday and Monday. Opening night set a new career-high in field goal attempts. He ranked 15th in the NBA in touches per game before Monday's games. Durability has always been the concern for Jerome. We're a week into the season, so we can't say whether or not this will last. If it does? His career is about to take off. If Jerome can maintain this workload, he's going to win Most Improved Player running away and probably make an All-Star Team. The Grizzlies wouldn't be playing him this much without real confidence that he could handle it. Case in point: they're still holding Zach Edey to around 22 minutes per game. If Jerome's body has turned some sort of corner that will allow him to keep playing starter minutes, he's about to become one of the most valuable offensive players in basketball.Loser: Orlando MagicAnother year, another notable injury for one of the Magic's starsMake it three consecutive seasons in which Paolo Banchero has suffered a meaningful injury in October or November. In both 2025 and 2026, Franz Wagner suffered injuries around Banchero's return. We can't say for certain that the increased workload overburdens Wagner, but it certainly isn't helping, and the stakes for the Wagner-Banchero partnership this season are higher than ever. Re-signing key restricted free agent Anthony Black would take the Magic close to the second apron next season, and this is a group that hasn't even won a playoff series yet. They start every season behind the eight ball, and in a conference this deep, that's a recipe for the Play-In Tournament or worse. The Magic are running out of bullets to fire here. They've changed coaches. They've made their all-in trade. If they still can't get over the hump, the Banchero-Wagner questions start to become unavoidable. And to make matters worse, Jalen Suggs, another starter, has a bone bruise.A nice start might have provided some valuable cover as the Magic attempted to answer those questions internally. Now, we're barreling toward another disappointing season and unavoidable, substantial changes to a roster we've never really gotten an extended look at. At least the Jalen Suggs injury wasn't as bad as it looked, but being without him for at least two weeks only makes life harder for the Magic. Winner: Houston RocketsHouston is taking off with Fred VanVleetWhat a difference a point guard makes. Remember how messy Houston's half-court offense looked a year ago without Fred VanVleet? Well, through their first three games, the Rockets scored 106.1 points per 100 plays in the half-court, up from 96.8 a year ago. They scored five more fast-break points per game as well, jumping from 14 to 19 per game. We haven't seen much Steven Adams yet, but it's worth noting, as per usual, that the Rockets had a 40% offensive rebound rate in his lone, nine-minute appearance thus far this season.The Rockets traded for Kevin Durant in the summer of 2025, expecting to have one sort of team. Losing VanVleet and, later, Adams turned them into a different, inferior team. This season is their shot at a mulligan, and three early wins to kick things off suggest that they're going to make the most of it. Loser: New Orleans PelicansMore head-scratching from one of the NBA's most confusing teamsIt's time for the Bayou's favorite annual tradition: the Pelicans wasting a good player. Last year, they DNP-CD'd Jose Alvarado on opening night. They wound up trading him for loose change and he proceeded to become an essential part of an NBA champion. This year, they thought they'd raise the stakes with a higher-profile player.What on Earth is happening with Herbert Jones? Why is the best and perhaps only defender on this team playing 17 minutes a game? He comes with obvious offensive deficiencies, of course, but they're still starting two non-shooting big men and are at the bottom of the league in 3-point attempt rate anyway, so they might as well get a defensive bump out of their questionable shot profile. He was the 10th-most used Pelicans player in Saturday's disastrous collapse against the Denver Nuggets, one in which Jamal Murray torched them for 42 points. Jones was his primary defender on just a single shot attempt, according to NBA.com tracking data. He played less than Jordan Poole.If this is how the Pelicans felt about Jones or his fit on the roster, why didn't they trade him over the summer? There would have been suitors. The longer this goes on, the lower his trade value slips. We're now entering the second season under this Joe Dumars regime, and what exactly his long-term vision here is remains a mystery.