Buy Or Sell NBA's Most Surprising Starts This Season

The Detroit Pistons are the best team in the East, the San Antonio Spurs are going to win at least 50 games and the Orlando Magic are the biggest paper tiger in recent memory.

Those would be your conclusions if you had to stop your analysis of the 2025-26 NBA season today. Fortunately, we don't have to carve anything in stone just yet. With another five-plus months to go in the campaign, we know plenty can change. We also know that not all of these surprising starts are phonies.

Let's evaluate teams that are performing in ways that were hard to see coming—some better than expectations, and some worse—before rendering verdicts on which of these shocking starts is sustainable.

Yet again, the NBA is proving that the only thing you can reliably expect is the unexpected.

Detroit Pistons

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Coming into the season, the Detroit Pistons were a decent bet to post another win total in the mid-40s as long as Cade Cunningham could sustain last year's All-NBA leap and the secondary playmaking offered him enough offensive support.

Currently atop the Eastern Conference, the Pistons are treating those expectations a lot like opposing players who wander into the lane. Which is to say: They're bludgeoning them.

Detroit's interior dominance is the key to its success. The Pistons average the most points in the paint and allow the fourth-fewest. Opponents have bottom-10 rim attempt frequency and accuracy rates against Detroit, and would-be scorers are in particular trouble when Isaiah Stewart is in the game. His presence on the floor coincides with an 11.1 percent decline in rim accuracy (93rd percentile among bigs) and an 9.3 percent dip in attempt frequency (99th).

Ausar Thompson is similarly elite as a rim-protector at his position, and Jalen Duren has made some strides on D. But Stewart has basically become a walking embodiment of that time Gandalf shouted, "You shall not pass!"

One drawback: The Pistons foul a ton. No team surrenders a higher opponent free-throw rate. So far, that hasn't exacted a large enough toll to hurt their bottom line. Through their first dozen games, 10 of which were wins, the Pistons rank second in defensive efficiency.

With Cunningham looking like an even bigger star than he did last season, that's more than enough to stamp Detroit's start as legit.

Verdict: Buy

Orlando Magic

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At 6-6 and routinely showing up in the "What's wrong with these guys?" discussions that crop up at this point of the season, the Orlando Magic haven't looked much like the 50-win, up-and-coming juggernaut they were supposed to be.

While it's fair to worry about Orlando's uninventive, rudimentary offensive tactics, most signs still point to a righting of the ship.

For starters, key newcomer Desmond Bane will not continue to make less than 30.0 percent of his open and wide-open threes. He needs to take more long-rangers than his current 4.4 per game (down from last season's 6.1), but career 40.7 percent three-point gunners don't just suddenly lose their strokes in the middle of what should be their prime years.

Beyond that, the Magic appear committed to making up for their shooting issues with brute force. Not team gets to the foul line more often than Orlando, and Paolo Banchero leads the way with a career-best 9.3 free-throw attempts per game. His recent groin injury isn't ideal, but the Magic posted a plus-10.2 net rating last season with Banchero off the floor and Franz Wagner on it. They can survive as long as both of their star forwards aren't sidelined.

Orlando hammered the New York Knicks on Nov. 12 to secure their fifth win in seven games, a truer representation of their potential than the 1-4 start that triggered so much concern.

Verdict: Sell

San Antonio Spurs

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If you took the under on the San Antonio Spurs' preseason figure of 44.5 wins, you did it uncomfortably.

Victor Wembanyama's potential to obliterate expectations, to thrust himself into the MVP conversation, to completely transform his team on both ends loomed large. Sure, it was the rational thing to opt for the under. San Antonio was going to hand lots of offensive touch time to inexperienced guards, and De'Aaron Fox's fit was uncertain. Nobody was really sure Mitch Johnson could excel as a head coach. And what of Wemby's health outlook?

There were plenty of good reasons to be conservative. Now that the Spurs are off to an 8-3 start led by Wembanyama's two-way brilliance, they all seem silly.

This was a pretty classic case of overthinking. If Wembanyama was going to be who we thought he could, then the Spurs were always going to blow past what seemed like an ambitiously high over/under total. Generational talents lift their teams to heights they shouldn't be able to reach, and Wembanyama certainly looks like one of them.

He's averaging 26.2 points, 13.0 rebounds, 4.0 assists and a league-leading 3.6 blocks per game while hitting 50.5 percent of his shots from the field.

It's possible San Antonio won't be able to sustain its top-10 spot in offensive rating. Turnovers are a problem—both for Wemby and second-year guard Stephon Castle—and a mostly young roster predictably fouls too often. But Wembanyama is a defense unto himself, and Fox's return from a hamstring injury certainly isn't going to hurt the overall product.

The Spurs have beaten early expectations, which means we need to adjust them. Maybe the over/under should have been 50.5 wins.

Verdict: Buy

Phoenix Suns

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In hindsight, maybe we focused too much on the glaring recent history of capricious ownership and management missteps, which obscured the fact that the Phoenix Suns might put a respectable product on the court this season.

Yes, Phoenix's catastrophic trades of the last couple of seasons destroyed its long-term prospects of contention. But the 2025-26 team, in isolation, probably didn't get a fair evaluative shake. What's more, it might have been a mistake to assume new head coach Jordan Ott would bungle the rotation and fail to motivate the team like his predecessors.

The Suns are 7-5 through their first dozen games, boasting a plus-3.6 net rating and sitting above the league average in both offensive and defensive efficiency. The schedule hasn't been a gauntlet by any stretch, but Phoenix put up lackluster efforts against all levels of competition a year ago. Now, under Ott, those no-show nights seem to be a thing of the past.

Devin Booker is performing in line with high expectations, but Grayson Allen and Royce O'Neale are dramatically exceeding them. Allen, in particular, has been on a heater all year. He's on track to set career highs in scoring (19.0 points per game), assists (4.5) and made threes (4.2 per game at a 44.6 percent clip).

Are the Suns going to win more games than they lose this season? Probably not. The team's lack of a proven point guard and Mark Williams' historic unavailability at center have yet to really burn them. At the same time, this isn't anything close to the unmitigated disaster most expected.

Phoenix is a real team that should challenge for a Play-In berth, and it even has an outside shot at one of the more favorable No .7 or No. 8 spots with a few breaks.

Verdict: Buy

LA Clippers

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Potential injuries for Kawhi Leonard and James Harden were always a source of consternation when projecting the Clips for 2025-26, but it would have been hard to accept this 3-8 start even if both had yet to play a game.

Virtually everything has gone wrong for LA so far. It sits at No. 22 in offensive rating and No. 29 in defensive rating, undone by a plague of turnovers and a bench that has underproduced across the board. It's especially hard to fathom how the Clippers' reserves have failed so thoroughly, as the offseason additions were supposed to make bench a clear strength.

Chris Paul is piling up DNP-CDs for the first time in his career, Bradley Beal is out for the season and all three of John Collins, Bogdan Bogdanović and Brook Lopez have disappointed. At least one or two of those backups is bound to perform in line with expectations eventually, and that's just one of the reasons not to give up on the Clippers.

Another: Harden, Leonard and Ivica Zubać have all played at expected levels. That includes Zubac, who was unlikely to match last year's career season but who has been solid enough in averaging 15.2 points and 10.5 rebounds while shooting 61.9 percent from the floor. Leonard has missed time lately, but that was always part of the bargain. He's averaging 24.3 points, 5.7 rebounds and 3.5 assists on a 50/40/90 shooting split.

Lastly, we can go ahead and assume opponents won't keep shooting 40.4 percent from three against LA, including 41.1 percent from above the break. Both rank 30th in the league and are wholly unsustainable.

The Clippers may not be contenders, but we knew that. We also know they're nowhere near this bad.

Verdict: Sell

Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.

Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.