Welcome to our favorite time of the year: panic season!
Usually, it takes about a dozen games to have fairly reliable (as in, at least somewhat predictive) data about where a team stands and where it’s heading. Most of the NBA has played 12 games as of Wednesday night.
As a result, once we get to this point in mid-November, it’s much harder for teams to write off poor performance as a result of small samples. Keeping with that theme, we had our first firing of the new season Tuesday, with the Panic! At the American Airlines Center resulting in Dallas axing general manager Nico Harrison 11 games into the Mavericks’ campaign.
Panic season offers some particularly compelling theater this season because of several situations developing across the always-competitive Western Conference. Notably, we have another major panic situation developing in Los Angeles with the news that Bradley Beal will miss the season because of a hip fracture. The Clippers are only 3-8 as it is. Meanwhile, the Golden State Warriors lost six straight road games, the Memphis Grizzlies have half a roster and a half-trying Ja Morant, the New Orleans Pelicans are terrible and gave away their draft pick and the Sacramento Kings are … the Sacramento Kings.
While the East isn’t drama-free either (greetings, Orlando!), the size and scale of their panic situations pale in comparison to those we’re seeing in the West right now. Seven teams in particular began this season with at least some hope of playoff contention, if not outright title contention in a few cases, and have seen their early-season performance fall well short of that mark. I covered the Mavericks after Harrison’s firing; today, it’s time for the others.
Let’s walk through them case by case, with the help of a special advanced analytics tool I’ve called the “Panic Alarm Meter” that rates each team on a 1-5 scale.
Timberwolves: 🚨
I was pretty worried about Minnesota based on how it looked coming out of the gate, and I’m not completely at ease just yet. The Timberwolves’ young guys have mostly been disappointing, Mike Conley’s age has left them without a real point guard in the starting five, and their wackadoo shooting numbers might not be sustainable.
Offsetting that, however, is the fact that Minnesota is 7-4 with a plus-5.5 net rating despite not defending particularly well and missing Anthony Edwards for four games. When I watched the Wolves the first two weeks of the season, I didn’t feel Rudy Gobert’s defensive presence, and that had me worried because the larger idea of this team as a contender centers on elite defense.
Alas, the recent Gobert Resurrection Game in Sacramento has me feeling quite a bit better. From the moment he swatted this Domantas Sabonis jump shot in the opening minute, it felt like the old Rudy was back, and this team only works if he’s a dominating defensive linchpin. Gobert blocked 10 shots in three games this week and shot 20 of 24 from the field. That’ll do.
(Side note: Nice D, Dennis Schröder. We’ll get to that in a minute.)
What keeps me somewhat worried is that the kids who were supposed to fill Nickeil Alexander-Walker’s spot haven’t done it yet: Terrance Shannon Jr. is off to a rocky start, and 2024 lottery pick Rob Dillingham still looks overmatched at this level. The Wolves can overcome that if Edwards is shooting 50 percent from 3 and Julius Randle plays like an inner-ring All-Star, but the shooting stats don’t feel sustainable. In a related story, five of Minnesota’s first 11 games were against doormats (two against Utah, one each versus Indiana, Brooklyn and Charlotte). The Wolves lost twice to the Lakers, got pummeled by the Knicks and Nuggets and barely beat Portland.
It still feels like they need something else to hang with the conference’s true elite, but the Wolves are at the second-apron threshold and have no draft picks to trade. Morant? That feels slightly desperate, even if they could meet Memphis’ price.
Kings: 🚨🚨
I’m only putting this here on the off chance you thought the Kings would be good. So basically, if you don’t work for the Kings, you can move along.
Seriously, there was an idea that Sacramento could be a league-average team this season. Maybe it could lean into speed and offense and cobble together a team defense that was quasi-respectable despite a lack of good individual defenders.
Reality check: The Kings are 27th in defense, helped along by an injury to Keegan Murray and their bizarre reluctance to play their best remaining wing defender (Keon Ellis). They ignored all the boring-but-useful low-usage 3-and-D forwards on the free-agent market to sign Doug McDermott and Russell Westbrook. They signed Schröder because they didn’t want Malik Monk playing point guard, but Schröder has been a major negative so far.
At least they had the right idea in a failed offseason quest: One guy who probably would have helped is Jonathan Kuminga, given the Kings’ lack of wing size and above-the-rim athleticism. But at this point, is shooting a future draft pick into the sun just to acquire Kuminga and max out a badly fitting, capped-out roster really the best move?
The Kings have never had the patience for a true rebuild, but it might be time for them to cash out on Monk, Sabonis, Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan and start over. They won’t fetch a ton — LaVine and Sabonis are overpaid for what they are and don’t have a ton of fans in other front offices, while DeRozan is 36 — but I don’t see an alluring alternative here. The Kings’ best path forward might be to go backward.
Warriors: 🚨🚨
The Warriors lost six straight road games before Wednesday’s win in San Antonio, have a neutral net rating and blew an 11-point lead in the last five minutes in Indiana with their A team on the court. That’s the Pacers’ only win this season!
That’s worrisome, but we’re not quite in freak-out territory. The Warriors have been playing the long game to some extent, with no player averaging more than 30.4 minutes per game and Steve Kerr using the entire roster (14 players have played in at least eight games). Draymond Green has been a turnover machine, Al Horford is showing his age, and the two key young players (Kuminga and Brandin Podziemski) haven’t taken a notable step forward.
On the other hand, they’re probably due for a bit of positive shooting variance (Stephen Curry is at “just” 36.9 percent), second-round pick Will Richard looks like a steal and can probably soak up more minutes, and the Warriors still have the league’s ninth-ranked defense.
The biggest reason not to count out the Warriors, however, is their ability to do in-season work. They have three tradeable first-round picks and Kuminga to dangle in a trade and would likely be a welcome landing spot for any disgruntled star.
Grizzlies: 🚨🚨🚨
The good news in Memphis is that the Grizzlies’ offseason judgment was correct: Ja Morant is not reliable enough to construct a championship team around, and thus, moving on from Desmond Bane in return for four first-round picks was absolutely the right call. One of the players they got as a result of that trade, rookie wing Cedric Coward, looks like a long-term starter at worst.
The bad news in Memphis is that … Morant is not reliable enough to construct a championship team around. Even if he managed to string together seven straight games for the first time since March 2023 — sitting out Wednesday in Boston ended his latest Ironman streak at five — Morant is no longer the electrifying superstar of 2022 and 2023. His indifferent effort and declining efficiency were red flags long before the latest spat with head coach Tuomas Iisalo blew up.
Tuesday’s performance in New York, particularly in the first half, was jarring. He’s standing dead upright in the middle of the play:
Even when Morant finally springs into action, it’s to fake defending Jordan Clarkson and then run away, the defensive answer to ghost screening. (Note: I chose that clip, but I had plenty of options.)
Morant might be the league’s most disappointing player so far. He is shooting 35.2 percent from the field, 16.7 percent from 3 and has a PER of 12.1. After a halfway decent first 10 days, he has become a disastrous liability since openly mailing in the second half of a winnable game Oct. 31 against the Lakers. He has 29 turnovers in his last five games and has shot an unfathomable 28 of 101 from the floor in the past six.
It’s not clear how the Grizzlies should navigate this. Trading Morant seems like an obvious option, but who wants to commit to paying him the max through 2028? Would the Grizzlies be willing to take back pennies on the dollar just to be rid of him? All signs point to this dragging out even longer, even if it ends in the Ben Simmons zone. The summer 2025 “reset” still could end up in a full-on “rebuild;” in particular, Memphis could likely net a big return if it ever dangled Jaren Jackson Jr. on the trade market.
Bigger picture, Memphis is 4-9 and ranked in the bottom 10 in both offense and defense. The Grizzlies aren’t really set up for a frenzy of trading until the summer, as virtually every player has at least two seasons left on his deal, but circumstances might force them to act sooner. Getting some of their injured players back in the lineup should help, particularly center Zach Edey and guards Ty Jerome and Scotty Pippen Jr., but if Morant remains terrible, nothing else will matter much.
LA Clippers 🚨🚨🚨🚨
Wow, was I wrong? I really thought the Clippers would be good this season. They are … not good.
LA had, um, aspirations toward being a conference finals-level squad this season, but the Clippers are 3-8 with a minus-6.2 net rating despite a soft early schedule. Even with James Harden, Ivica Zubac and Kawhi Leonard mostly performing as expected, the Clippers have been repeatedly exposed as one of the league’s least athletic and versatile teams. Offensively, they have the league’s highest turnover rate, and defensively, they’re getting absolutely smoked in transition night after night.
Entering the season, the biggest potential fail point for LA seemed to be if its old players all suddenly declined at once. Well … guess what? The Clippers’ bench has been a disaster because Brook Lopez, Chris Paul, Nic Batum, Bogdan Bogdanović and the now-injured Beal have been mere shadows of their former selves.
Bogdanović has played 111 total minutes across five games and was pulled almost instantly in his two starts. Beal is already out for the year after giving the Clippers nothing in the six games he played. Nic Batum has 12 baskets in 11 games. The 7-foot-1 Lopez has four offensive rebounds. Four!
As for Paul … I will always remember this play. Oct. 28, 2025: The exact moment I realized the 40-year-old Point God might finally be washed.
Underscoring the Clippers’ woes is one massive mistake: Believing that Beal would be an adequate replacement for Norman Powell, and thus that they could trade Powell for John Collins. Collins hasn’t been bad, but the Clippers have been operating with a gaping hole at shooting guard all season and desperately miss Powell’s pace and floor spacing. They didn’t even get a pick back for Powell.
What can they even do now? The Clippers owe their first-round pick to the Thunder, so tanking is out, and they also don’t have a tradeable pick until 2030. Do they really want to mortgage more of their future for an extremely iffy present? (Or, more cynically, should they go ahead and trade them before the league potentially takes them away?)
The Clippers have wriggled out of some tight spots before over the past few years, but their first 11 games are the most troubling of any team in the conference. Except one…
New Orleans Pelicans 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
With a minus-13.1 net margin, the Pelicans are the only threat in the early season to the Nets-Pacers-Wizards Trislumvirate at the bottom of the East (3-31 combined!). That’s bad news considering the Pels’ front office hold-my-beered Nico Harrison in June by trading two likely 2026 lottery picks for the right to select Derik Queen 13th in the 2025 draft.
The awfulness of that trade has obscured the fact that New Orleans also surrendered its 2026 cap flexibility to turn CJ McCollum into Jordan Poole, who has been destructively bad (the already-bad Pelicans are 16.2 points per 100 possessions worse when he plays), and a visibly washed Kevon Looney is not the solution for their glaring hole at center.
Zion Williamson has played five of 11 games — right on track to miss at least half the schedule for a fifth time in seven seasons — and seemed to lack his usual explosiveness when he did play. Herb Jones, who looked like an elite role player two years ago, is sort of out there now, making little notable impact at either end; he just signed a three-year, $68 million extension that pays him through 2030.
The Pels also don’t like their coach but seemingly can’t fire him because the owner won’t allow it. Fun times!
There are bits of optimism to cling to if you search hard enough. Queen and fellow rookie Jeremiah Fears are mistake-prone but have some clear offensive talent. Trey Murphy has quietly become one of the best combo forwards in the league. Jose Alvarado is still a constant pest, and a healthy Williamson is still a game-changing layup machine.
Nonetheless, the Pelicans made a massive bet on being good enough in 2025-26 that trading their draft pick wouldn’t matter, and they are losing bigly. The only good news here is that they control their own picks every year after this one, as long as they keep Joe Dumars away from his two flip phones until after the trade deadline, and a couple of the players I noted above still have trade value. That means the Pels can undertake a proper tank-and-rebuild project after the season, if anyone in charge has the sense to pursue it.
