NBA Storylines Nobody Saw Coming – Bleacher Report

The first few weeks of the NBA season are a test of conviction.
Do you abandon the opinions you formed over months of offseason consideration when the results don’t match expectations? Or do you cry “small sample!” and label the 10 percent of the season you’ve seen as noise?
Obviously, no such tests of faith arise when teams and players perform the way you thought they would. It’s when the production goes off-script that doubts arise and re-thinking is required.
Here, we’ve got some surprising developments to consider—some of which will last and some of which won’t. In all cases, these early storylines defy expectations.

Who knew the Milwaukee Bucks’ entire defensive system depended on Jrue Holiday’s rear-view contests?
That’s only a half-serious analysis of what’s been missing during Milwaukee’s bizarre opening stretch, during which it has allowed bushels of points en route to a bottom-five defensive rating. This is a team with three top-four finishes on D across the previous five years. The Bucks’ worst finish in that stretch, 14th in 2021-22, had more to do with hot opponent shooting on mid-rangers and non-corner threes than any systemic failure.
Damian Lillard is a colossal downgrade from Holiday on defense, but the Bucks may have focused a little too much on compensating for Dame’s inferior work on that end. Head coach Adrian Griffin began the year with schemes that pulled Brook Lopez up toward the level of the screen, a strategy partly designed to create more turnovers but also to keep Lillard from going full turnstile at the point of attack.
It was a clear case of fixing what wasn’t broken. To Griffin’s credit, it only took a handful of games for him to put his center back into the deep drop that keyed Milwaukee’s consistent dominance and turned Lopez into a perennial Defensive Player of the Year candidate.
“Sometimes as coaches, we’re too smart for our own selves,” Griffin said, via the Athletic’s Eric Nehm, “and so a couple players came to me—I won’t disclose (them)—but they wanted Brook deeper in the drop and I was smart enough to listen to ’em and it paid off tonight.”
Lopez swatted eight shots in his first night back in drop coverage, keying a five-point win over the New York Knicks on Nov. 3.
Milwaukee has good reason to hope its surprisingly poor start on D won’t linger. Lillard’s presence poses problems, as does the lack of a shutdown wing (unless Griffin starts giving Marjon Beauchamp more than 15 minutes per game). But nobody could have foreseen the theoretically contending Bucks playing worse defense over the first few weeks of the season than the likes of the Indiana Pacers, Charlotte Hornets and Sacramento Kings.

Only the most blindly optimistic Philadelphia 76ers fans could have envisioned a start this smooth.
The rest of us expected the James Harden stalemate to linger, poisoning the season for as long as it lasted, circulating bad vibes that could eventually frustrate Joel Embiid to the point of a trade request. The bench was also depleted with Georges Niang, Shake Milton and Jalen McDaniels departing in free agency and Montrezl Harrell going down with a torn ACL before the season.
Tyrese Maxey was supposed to struggle, at least a little, in a leveled-up role.
Absolutely none of those justifiable concerns manifested, as the Sixers surged to six wins in their first seven games, posting the league’s No. 2 offensive rating and a point differential bettered only by the Boston Celtics, whom they defeated on Nov. 8.
Embiid is on pace to lead the league in scoring for a third straight year while blowing past his previous career-high in assists per game. His pick-and-roll chemistry with Maxey, who turned out to be totally ready for lead-guard duties, looks just as good as it did with Harden.
“In the first quarter, we ran [the pick-and-roll] one time, and I just saw how open it was and then I just told coach don’t even call nothing anymore,” Embiid told reporters after a 146-128 shellacking of the Washington Wizards. “Let’s just keep running it.”
Embiid finished that contest with 48 points, while Maxey added 22 points and 11 assists without a single turnover.
The vibes are good and will probably improve now that the skies are cleared of the Harden-shaped cloud floating over Philly. The Sixers, believe it or not, are somehow free of controversy and intrigue. With stellar chip-in efforts from supporting pieces Tobias Harris, De’Anthony Melton and Kelly Oubre Jr., it almost doesn’t matter if newcomers like Nicolas Batum, Robert Covington or Marcus Morris Sr. provide much value.
The rocky season so many expected never materialized. Instead, the Sixers are smoothly establishing themselves as a more functional, better team without Harden.

Other than the facts that he’s 22 years old and not so far removed from narrowly snatching Rookie of the Year honors away from Evan Mobley, Scottie Barnes didn’t start this season with many positive indicators.
Remember, the Toronto Raptors forward effectively stalled out in his sophomore campaign last year, shooting the ball worse from two-point range and falling all the way to 28.1 percent on his threes. Those were major red flags for a player who entered the league surrounded by questions about his shooting form.
Fair or not, the clunkiness of Toronto’s 2022-23 offense seemed tied to Barnes’ arrested development, and his disappointing play came on the heels of the Raptors expressing concerns about his offseason work ethic.
Last December, Doug Smith of the Toronto Star, noting that Barnes still “might turn out to be a very good” player, wrote “It’s hard to see any one area of the game that Barnes is better at in his second year than he was in his first.”
Consider what Barnes is doing this season a lesson on the value of patience. Or at the very least a reminder that growth trajectories aren’t perfectly linear.
The third-year forward has been a revelation, on pace for career highs across the board—21.5 points, 10.4 rebounds and 6.0 assists—while canning 38.1 percent of his threes on nearly double the volume of last season. Through his first eight games, Barnes averaged 2.1 blocks and 1.5 steals (defensive impact: check!) with the highest usage rate and true shooting percentage he’s ever posted.
This is a full-blown breakout by a player too many of us prematurely dismissed, and Barnes’ resumed ascent easily rates among the season’s most pleasant surprises.

The Phoenix Suns have yet to get their top three players on the floor together in a regular-season game, which isn’t some great shock given the injury histories of Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal.
Beal, who has averaged just 51 games played over the past four years, missed the Suns’ first seven games with a sore back. Booker has played just twice because of foot, ankle and calf issues. He’s played 70 games just once since 2016-17.
Meanwhile, the most fragile Suns star of all has been an absolute rock. Yes, it’s Durant who’s held things down for Phoenix in the absence of his big-name teammates, playing every game and averaging 29.3 points over an eyebrow-raising 36.6 minutes per game. Phoenix has needed every one of those points and minutes, as its offense craters and its net rating plummets by 21.7 points per 100 possessions whenever KD sits.
The workload has done nothing to diminish Durant’s performance. He’s still as devilishly smooth with the ball and as preposterously skilled as ever.
That said, this isn’t a sustainable strategy for the Suns, who are riding Durant much too hard given his history. The surefire Hall of Famer tends to be dominant whenever he’s healthy, but Durant, 35, missed all of 2019-20 with a torn Achilles and has averaged just 44 games across his last four seasons.
Durant has always balked at minutes limits and never goes at half-speed if he’s healthy enough to be on the floor. It’s a testament to his skill and toughness that he’s the lone star carrying the Suns through the season’s early stages. We’re lucky to watch him do this in his 17th season. But nobody expected him to be the pillar of consistency in Phoenix, and nobody—not us as outside observers and certainly not the Suns—should feel comfortable about KD going full iron man in October and November.

Even if you thought the whole “Chris Paul as sixth man” gambit might work, you had to acknowledge the potential for hiccups when he joined the Golden State Warriors.
Paul had started each of his previous 1,214 career games while generally operating as a ball-dominant pick-and-roll spammer, very often against these same Warriors in high-stakes, hotly contested games. From role to playing style to personality clashes, strife of all stripes was foreseeable. That’s to say nothing of the possibility that Paul, in his 19th season and trending steadily downward over the last several years, might be washed up.
The experiment has been a rousing success. Though Paul hasn’t shot the ball well, he’s grifting fouls, organizing the offense and injecting a sense of calm capability into a team plagued for years by turnovers.
Most importantly, Paul has given Golden State something it’s never really had: a way to not just survive the minutes when Stephen Curry rests, but to actually win them.
With Paul on the floor and Curry off, the Warriors are outscoring opponents by 9.7 points per 100 possessions. When the two play together, that number spikes to plus-17.5.
Apart or together, Curry and Paul are driving Golden State’s strong start. Following a year in which the backups coughed up leads and the locker room tenor were testy, the Warriors are watching advantages balloon when Curry rests and haven’t had the faintest whiff of drama off the floor.
The Paul acquisition will ultimately be evaluated on a single criterion, whether or not the Warriors are the last team standing in June. But to this point, CP3’s fit has been better than anyone could have imagined.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Accurate through Nov. 8. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report’s Dan Favale.

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