We couldn't even settle in before the season went sideways, could we? After a relatively ordinary first few days, the entire NBA seemed to catch the injury bug in Week 2. A seemingly endless list of All-Stars went down in the past seven days with injuries that will keep them out for periods ranging from a few weeks to, potentially, the entire season, and after just 13 days of basketball, the league-wide landscape suddenly looks completely different.
So let's look back on the week that was and rank some winners and losers from the NBA's last seven days.
Three biggest winners of the week
1. Memphis Grizzlies
Raise a glass for the NBA's last unbeaten team, the... Memphis Grizzlies? Huh? Yes, the Memphis Grizzlies, one of last season's most egregious tankers, are running roughshod over the rest of the NBA. As of Sunday afternoon, they rank...
- No. 1 in the NBA in net rating (+14.7).
- No. 2 in the NBA in rebounding rate (54.1%).
- No. 3 in offense (118.8 points per 100 possessions).
- No. 3 in defense (104.1 points per 100 possessions allowed).
Even after cooling off following his preposterously hot start, Ty Jerome has still made more runners (19) than all but a handful of players have attempted. Jerome may be cooling off, but Cam Boozer is heating up: the No. 3 overall pick just shot 50-44-100 for the week and picked up his first career triple-double in a win over the then-unbeaten Portland Trail Blazers (and former Grizzlies star Ja Morant). Nobody can miss a 3. Zech Edey and Isaiah Stewart are almost completely walling off the rim. Grizzlies opponents are taking only 19 shots per game in the restricted area.
The pick-and-roll-heavy scheme Tuomas Iisalo was known for abroad is finally coming together in the NBA. Only the Cleveland Cavaliers have generated more shots out of pick-and-roll than Memphis. Only the Miami Heat and Houston Rockets are scoring more points per possession on those shots. After Iisalo's short-stint rotations caused so much of an uproar last season, Memphis has gotten off to this start with nobody averaging even 32 minutes a game.
Memphis won't be this good forever. They've played a Charmin soft schedule. Eventually, they'll start missing 3s, and Jerome will probably settle somewhere between the MVP frontrunner he was in Week 1 and the far less effective player we saw in Week 2. But all of this winning isn't a fluke. It's not as though their opponents are just missing shots. They're killing the teams that they're playing. Even if 82-0 is unrealistic, a playoff berth certainly feels realistic for a Grizzlies team that is thriving to start the season.
2. Houston Rockets
Nobody roots for injuries, but teams certainly benefit from them. We came into the season assuming the Thunder and Spurs were heavy championship favorites. The Thunder are suddenly in peril, and the Rockets beat San Antonio head-to-head in the season's opening week. They have one of the few big men in the NBA in Alperen Sengun who seems genuinely comfortable attacking Victor Wembanyama. He shot 17 of 23 against Wembanyama as the primary defender last season, according to NBA.com tracking data. He just dropped a 29-7-7 on him in Houston's second game of the year. The stars are aligning for the Rockets already.
This isn't purely a matter of circumstance, either. Houston has clearly leveled up with Fred VanVleet back in the fold. They'd likely be standing alongside the Grizzlies in the ranks of the undefeated had Sengun not missed Friday's loss to the Dallas Mavericks. After a year of consternation about their mess of a half-court offense, Houston ranks fourth in the NBA in points per 100 half-court plays thus far this season. They have the NBA's No. 1 overall offense despite barely getting any minutes out Steven Adams so far. Just imagine how easily they'll score with his offensive rebounding in the mix.
The season is far too young to say anything definitively, especially with injuries coming so quickly. For now, at least, Houston should feel relatively safe about outwinning Oklahoma City in the regular season, and it has a one-game lead and a head-to-head victory over San Antonio in its back pocket. The No. 1 seed feels much more attainable to them than it did two weeks ago, and with it would come the easiest possible path to the NBA Finals.
3. Yaxel Lendeborg
The consensus surrounding Lendeborg as a draft prospect was that, as a 24-year-old on opening night, he would arrive in the NBA as a productive player, but would have limited upside to grow beyond that. He's older than Jonathan Kuminga, after all, so it's not as though his arrival heralded the emergence of yet another timeline. At this rate, though, it might not matter if Lendeborg has already peaked as an NBA player, because the last week suggests he might have arrived in the NBA as a star.
His collegiate career-high in scoring was 30 points. He's topped that figure twice in the last week alone, and it's not as though he's doing that with crazy volume. His season-high in shot attempts (20) is Darius Acuff's season-low. His only bad game of the week came in his hyped rematch with Luka Dončić... a game the Golden State Warriors still managed to win despite Lendeborg claiming he "wet the bed."
Lendeborg's emergence has a chance to be genuinely transformative for Golden State. Suddenly the Warriors have the secondary scorer they need next to Curry. When Jimmy Butler returns, they'll have one of the most physically imposing pairs of forwards in the NBA, helping to offset their size issues at center with Kristaps Porziņģis sidelined. Maybe Lendeborg is even good enough to compel Golden State to attach draft picks to Porziņģis' contract and go make a win-now move. A week ago, the Warriors were winless and limping their way through a hopeless season. They've since won four straight and generated their first real dose of optimism since Butler tore his ACL, and it's almost entirely because of a rookie that somehow slipped out of the top 10 of the draft.
Three biggest losers of the week
1. Oklahoma City Thunder
On Monday, the Thunder announced that both Jalen Williams and Cason Wallace would have surgeries that could end their seasons. That night, they lost Alex Caruso to a sprained ankle. That's a year's worth of injury news in a night, and then on Friday, it came out Chet Holmgren has a small patellar tendon tear that will require an 8-10 week absence following a "biological" treatment. What exactly that means for his long-term health prospects is unclear.
The Thunder opened the season by avenging their Western Conference Finals loss to the San Antonio Spurs. They followed that up by dispatching the player team that pushed them to the brink in the 2025 playoffs: Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets. They looked like heavy championship favorites.
Now? It's possible that they reached the point of no return on injuries before Halloween, and if they haven't now, they could at any moment. We went from "the Thunder are the best team in the NBA" to "the Thunder could trade their way back into the championship picture" to "does it really make sense for the Thunder to start their luxury tax in this nightmare season?" all in the span of a few days. That last question is still months away from an answer, but the fact that it's even on the table is a testament to just how disastrous the last week or so has been in Oklahoma City.
2. Phoenix Suns
We have our first reports of an unhappy team in this early season, and it is one of last year's surprise success stories: the Phoenix Suns. On Thursday, Chris Haynes explained that "there is some growing frustration within that locker room for the simple fact that that roster does not have a point guard that can organize that offense."
We should clarify here that the Suns do have a point guard on their roster... they're just not starting him. The Suns are scoring 123.2 points per 100 possessions with Collin Gillespie on the floor... and 106.4 with him off it, according to Cleaning the Glass. Pretty much all of the underlying numbers suggest that simply starting Gillespie over Jalen Green could solve some of these point guard issues. The Suns assist on 76.3% of their baskets with Gillespie on the floor so far this season, but only 54.2% of them with him off it. Devin Booker has a 68.1% true shooting percentage with Gillespie playing and a 51.3% mark without him.
The decision to start Green was a questionable one even before the season started. He wasn't really a part of last season's success. He was a No. 2 overall pick, sure, but that was for a different team. The Suns don't have enough invested in Green to justify the continued usage of these suboptimal lineups. They frankly have too many real problems to continue creating more of them for themselves with suboptimal lineup decisions.
The Suns had a top-10 defense a year ago. They rank 30th early in this season. Their dominant offensive rebounding has slipped to the middle of the pack as well, and even their turnover rate has ticked up a bit. The Suns beat expectations last season because they were disciplined and they played harder than anyone in the league. They've fallen from No. 5 to No. 26 in deflections per game this season, and No. 6 to No. 26 in loose ball recoveries. These aren't the hustle Suns of a year ago, at least thus far. Some of that can be traced back to the players taking on new prominence this season. Green isn't exactly known as a high-energy player. Neither is Miles Bridges, who has thus far underwhelmed following Phoenix's decision to trade an unprotected first-round pick for him over the summer.
The Suns were the feel-good story of last season. Going from that to the first team to leak displeasure to the press this season is a pretty precipitous drop. A point guard upgrade, internal or external, isn't going to address everything wrong with this team.
3. Utah Jazz
The Jazz are actually trying to win for the first time in the Will Hardy era... yet they're playing worse than they did when they were trying to lose. Utah's 1-5 start is the second-worst of Hardy's tenure in Utah, trailing only the six-game losing streak that kicked off their 2024-25 season. Utah's offense -- vaunted for thriving with limited resources at points during the Jazz rebuild -- is scoring fewer points per 100 possessions (105.3) than it did in any full season during the Hardy era.
The loss of the perpetually injury-prone Jaren Jackson Jr. to a torn MCL this week brought several major decisions Utah has made over the past year or so into question. The Jazz gave up three first-round picks to get Jackson on a max deal, and he's thus far given them nine games. They traded Walker Kessler and passed on Cam Boozer in the NBA Draft in part because they had Jackson. Kessler's Lakers are 5-2, and Boozer is competing with Lendeborg to become the early Rookie of the Year frontrunner. No. 2 overall pick Darryn Peterson has been by far the least impressive of the top four picks in June's draft thus far and was even benched down the stretch of an overtime loss to the San Antonio Spurs.
We're six games into the season. It is much too early to panic over the state of the Jazz. But after punting four full seasons to get where they are now, Utah certainly expected more than it has gotten thus far, and with Jackson injured, there's no telling when or if the Jazz will be able to turn things around.