NBA Panic Meter: Five Teams and Players Starting on Thin Ice

Teams involved in big trades this offseason, such as the Grizzlies and Bucks, have faced a learning curve to start 2023–24, but not everyone needs to sound the alarm.

In lieu of this week’s mailbag (since many of the questions I received via social media or by email began with some variation of “how concerned should Team X or Player Y be?”), we’re going to break out the way-too-early Panic Meter. How it works: The scale goes from one to 10, with one being the equivalent of a shoulder shrug, a not much to see here about a problem that isn’t really a problem. A 10 is the basketball version of an asteroid eradicating all life as we know it.

Let’s begin …

Grizzlies

Panic Meter: 8

You could hear the sighs of relief all the way to Knoxville, Tenn., on Sunday after the Grizzlies topped the Blazers to claim their first win of the season. Desmond Bane (30 points) was brilliant. Jaren Jackson Jr., too, and Luke Kennard (15 points on a team-high +30) provided a spark off the bench. Meanwhile Memphis’s once-vaunted defense held Portland to sub-40% from the floor and the three-point line.

Is this the spark Memphis needed? Well …

The Grizz have problems. Lots of them. The offense is bad. Memphis entered Sunday’s game 30th in offensive efficiency. Without Ja Morant—and with Tyus Jones shipped out in the Marcus Smart deal—the Grizzlies lack a floor general. Smart is a much better playmaker than he gets credit for, but demanding the 2018 All-Star step into a new situation with a lot of moving parts and run the offense is a big ask. Bane has been reliable, but when he goes out the Grizz offense has completely stalled.

Defensively, things aren’t a lot better. Memphis lost in Portland on Friday after the defense collapsed in the fourth quarter. Jackson is better equipped to play power forward, which is probably why recently signed Bismack Biyombo started at center Sunday. (Biyombo finished with eight points, 11 rebounds and three blocks, at +18, the best among starters. Expect that to continue.) And injuries, along with Morant’s suspension, have forced Taylor Jenkins to dig deeper into his bench than he would probably like.

Things will improve when Morant returns. Particularly in the half court, where the Grizz have struggled. But Steven Adams is done for the season. Brandon Clarke is out until at least the second half, and, even then, expecting a player returning from an ACL tear to contribute to a playoff push is asking a lot. Derrick Rose has already been in and out of the lineup. It’s early, but there are already some gap-year vibes coming out of Memphis.

Lakers

Panic Meter: 4

It seemed to me—and probably the Lakers—that bringing the band back from a 43-win team that went 16–7 after the All-Star break and zipped to the conference finals last season would lead to a fast start in this one. Instead the Lakers are 3–3 with a middle-of-the-pack defense and an offense that is bizarrely worse. Opponents are feasting on second-chance points (117–54) and outscoring the Lakers 210–139 in the first quarter. After getting clobbered on the offensive glass by the Magic on Saturday, coach Darvin Ham sounded like a man annoyed with his team’s effort.

“You can’t scheme rebounding. You’ve got to want to get the damn ball, plain and simple,” Ham said. “The shot goes up, if your opponent is in your area, you’ve got to get hits, put bodies on bodies and be the most aggressive one to the ball. That’s it. There’s no play I can draw up to get more rebounds. There’s no play I can draw up to have more guys there. And when we do have more guys there, we’re showing clips with four or five white jerseys and one blue jersey in the middle, and that blue jersey is coming up with the ball. I don’t know.”

So what gives? Why are the likes of Goga Bitadze and Moritz Wagner dominating the Lakers on the glass? Some of it, as Ham noted, can be attributed to effort, particularly on the road, where Los Angeles has started 0–3. Rui Hachimura, who hasn’t exactly blasted out of the gates, missed the last two games with a concussion, and the Lakers look like a team that misses the energy of Jarred Vanderbilt, who averaged 10 rebounds per 36 minutes in 26 games last season.

Still, there’s probably no cause for panic or need to make a knee-jerk trade. The Lakers had a top-five defensive rating after the All-Star break last season, and it stands to reason that when Hachimura, Vanderbilt and Taurean Prince get back, they will improve. Anthony Davis is still prone to the occasional disappearing act, but he’s averaged 26.3 points and 13 rebounds (all Lakers-career bests) while sending back a league-high 3.7 shots per game. There’s reason to take notice. But panic? Not yet.

Julius Randle

Panic Meter: 6

What is it with Randle? Is he the dead-eye three-point bomber he was during the 2020–21 season (41.1%) or the catastrophe from beyond the arc (30.8%) he was the following season? Is he the (reasonably) efficient big man he was last season (45.9%) or the horror show (27.1%) through six games in this one? And before you decry this as a media overreaction to a small sample size, here’s what Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau had to say about his team after a disappointing loss to the Bucks, comments that were widely interpreted as being directed at Randle.

“You can’t predetermine,” Thibodeau said. “You can’t say, ‘Well, I haven’t had a shot, so now I’m gonna take a shot.’ The game tells you what to do. If you’re open, you shoot. If there’s three guys around, you hit the open man. It’s really simple. It’s not hard.”

Yet everything has been hard for the Knicks, at least offensively. And Randle has become the face of it. Entering Sunday’s games Randle ranked 182nd out of 189 starters in effective field goal percentage, per NBA.com. His numbers across the board have cratered, he still can’t figure out what to do when teams send blind side help defenders and he became a bad highlight reel Friday when he was seen throwing his hands up after not getting a pass from Jalen Brunson late in the fourth quarter and then walking back on defense.

Again, it’s not just Randle. The Knicks rank in the bottom third in just about every offensive category. R.J. Barrett has run hot and cold. Quentin Grimes has, too, and, after shooting 58.6% in 25 games in New York last season, Josh Hart is connecting on 33.3% in this one. I swear Thibodeau looks like he’s one five-minute scoring drought away from pressing the Evan Fournier button.

Still, Randle is the lightning rod. When he’s good, as he was in 2020–21 and ’22–23, All-NBA seasons, he’s a legit No. 2 option. When he’s bad, as he was in ’21–22 and has been early this season, he’s a liability for a team that entered the campaign believing it had a shot at cracking the Eastern Conference top three.

Bulls

Panic Meter: 9

I mean, what are we doing, Chicago? What are we clinging to? What are we hoping is going to happen with a team that has the lowest ceiling of any would-be playoff contender? The Bulls are 2–5, and a one-point win over Toronto and a come-from-behind victory over Indiana away from being 0–7. (And, no, the reverse isn’t true—Chicago’s five losses have come by an average of 13.8 points.)

The three-point shooting has been awful (31%), the overall shooting (43.8%) has not been much better and the defense, top five in efficiency last season, has started this year in the bottom third. The Bulls had a players-only meeting—or a players-only “conversation,” depending on who you ask—after the first game of the season. Billy Donovan’s hold on that coaching job feels pretty tenuous at the moment.

Look, the Bulls had some bad luck—nay, terrible luck—when Lonzo Ball went down nearly two years ago. Who knows what this team could have been with Ball running the show. But he will miss his second straight season with a knee injury, and no one has any idea whether he will ever play again. Meanwhile, Chicago has an overpriced roster that has a best-case scenario of battling for a play-in spot.

The Bulls have shipped out a lot of picks in recent years, but they have their own first-round pick this year. And they can keep (temporarily) the first they owe San Antonio in 2025 as part of the Demar DeRozan trade if they bottom out and draft in the top 10 (that pick is top-eight protected in ’26). DeRozan, Zach LaVine and Nikola Vucevic could bring back varying degrees of draft capital on the open market. Alex Caruso might be more valuable than all of them.

Chicago doesn’t like to use the r-word, but the Bulls are rebuilding, even if they don’t know it. They have a good young player in Patrick Williams—who himself is off to a dreadful start—and a couple of interesting prospects (Ayo Dosunmu, Coby White) to start over with. It’s not great, but nothing about the Bulls is these days.

Bucks

Panic Meter: 5

I think we probably all got a little too excited after Damian Lillard’s season-opening 39-point explosion and forgot that the Bucks were going to be a work in progress. Swapping out Jrue Holiday for Lillard was bound to negatively impact the defense. And it has: Milwaukee, the NBA leader in defensive rating last season (110.9), has tumbled into the bottom third of the league this season (116). And the Lillard–Giannis Antetokounmpo pick-and-roll combination, widely expected to be one of the most lethal in recent memory, has not quite taken off. Want a bonkers stat? In 112 minutes Lillard and Giannis have played together, they have a net rating of -5.7.

Still, the reason the Panic Meter is so high weeks into the season is you have to view Milwaukee through a shamrock-shaped prism. This team won’t be judged by beating the Hawks, Nets or 76ers. The Celtics will be the test, and right now Boston looks to be the clear class of the conference, with near-historic scoring and defensive muscle in the backcourt. (Jrue Holiday and Derrick White, in 90 minutes on the court together, have a defensive rating of 99.5.)

But let’s assume the defense improves (the rim protection numbers will), and Lillard and Antetokounmpo figure it out. What about Khris Middleton? He played a season high in minutes (21) Friday and shot the ball well against the Knicks. But he’s clearly still trying to work his way back after offseason knee surgery, and how the Bucks have handled him shows how cautious they intend to be. Can Middleton get back to being the 30-plus-minute-per-game player he was two seasons ago? Or are those days permanently behind him?