At the risk of tempting fate, we're coming off of a pretty optimistic week in the NBA. The late-October rush of season-altering injuries has seemingly slowed down. The quality of basketball has been excellent, and stars are making history. Things in the NBA are so positive right now that there are multiple, ongoing seven-game winning streaks that won't be featured in our winners of the week.

So... who beat out the trimmed-for-space Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs? And who are our losers in a week full of winners? Let's dive into our rankings from the week that was.

Three biggest winners of the week

1. Oklahoma City Thunder

No Jalen Williams. No Cason Wallace. No Chet Holmgren. And also, no losses. That's the week that the Thunder just had, first sweeping their season series with the Cleveland Cavaliers before blowing the doors off of the Memphis Grizzlies and Washington Wizards by 70 combined points. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander averaged just under 36 points in the 4-0 stretch, but the story here is Oklahoma City finding a new formula to compensate for all of these absences.

The Thunder built their historic defense around turnover generation, leading the NBA on that front in their 2025 championship season and finishing No. 2 a year ago. They've fallen to 21st as of Sunday, accepting that they simply cannot play as aggressively without their core defenders as they once did. Instead, they're selling out to protect the basket. They allowed the second-fewest points in the paint per game a season ago... and have trimmed five of them off of their average this season. They've even started Isaiah Hartenstein and Aday Mara together in two of their past three games, though they've shared minimal possessions.

The defense may not be generating turnovers, but the offense isn't committing any either. Oklahoma City has taken its turnover-prevention offense to the extreme. The Thunder are averaging 231.6 passes per game, 10 fewer than any team in the tracking era. Only the Spurs and the Philadelphia 76ers, both healthy championship contenders, are turning the ball over less. This "no passes means no turnovers" offense only works if the individual creators are up to snuff. Gilgeous-Alexander obviously fits the bill, but now, so does Ajay Mitchell. The Thunder are scoring over 1.2 points per possession when Mitchell shoots out of pick-and-roll, good for the 94th percentile league-wide. He's scoring just under 25 points per 36 minutes, more than Cade Cunningham and just below Deni Avdija and Austin Reaves.

Thunder trade grades: OKC swipes promising young wing Nique Clifford from the rebuilding Kings

Sam Quinn

Oh yeah, and they made a trade with the Sacramento Kings. I'm comfortable calling any team lucky enough to trade with the Kings an automatic winner for that week, especially when they're acquiring a guard on a rookie contract. Do the words "Tyrese Haliburton" mean nothing to you, Sacramento? Nique Clifford certainly won't live up to that prematurely dealt King, but there's a parallel here to Davion Mitchell, another former first-round pick the Kings dealt who has since blossomed with the Miami Heat. You should trust no team's ability to evaluate players less than Sacramento's ... and no team's more than Oklahoma City's. If Sam Presti thinks Clifford can help the injury-ravaged Thunder, I'm inclined to believe that a price of two second-round picks is a bargain. All in all, it was about as perfect a week as the Thunder could have asked for.

2. Luka Dončić

He's averaging 40 points! This isn't a handful of games against terrible teams anymore. The Portland Trail Blazers have been great defensively against everyone except the Los Angeles Lakers because Luka has blitzed them for 94 points in two meetings. Of the 20 highest individual point totals so far this season, Dončić comes in at No. 1, No. 2, No. 5, No. 12, No. 17 and No. 18. The two biggest pillars of the MVP race are scoring and winning. Clearly, he's got the scoring down.

So far, winning hasn't been an issue either. The Lakers are 9-2, and it's almost exclusively because of the offense he runs. As of Sunday, the Lakers ranked 23rd in rebounding rate, 23rd in defense and 25th in turnover rate. It hasn't mattered because the offense is No. 1 with a bullet. The Lakers are roughly 34 points per 100 possessions better when he plays than when he sits, yet they were still able to pull off a critical road win over the Detroit Pistons on Sunday without him. The Lakers are a regular-season wins machine, and Dončić is the engineer.

It's not just the raw total, either. It's how this is all happening. Dončić currently leads the NBA in both 3-point attempts and free-throw attempts. When James Harden was doing that a decade ago, it was considered such witchcraft that defenders started standing behind him and guarding him with their hands behind their backs. I look forward to seeing what sort of nonsense teams concoct against Dončić if this continues. He's making 30-footers look like layups. He's giving Laker fans the sort of individual offense they haven't seen since Kobe Bryant's peak. Enjoy it. Stretches like this don't come around often.

3. LaMelo Ball

The underlying message of the Ball trade was that the Charlotte Hornets did not think he could be relied upon as a franchise player. Given the questions surrounding his durability, his defense and even his maturity, it wasn't a crazy thought. The idea that he would fare better in a secondary role in Minnesota made plenty of sense. He and Anthony Edwards looked like one of the NBA's best duos in the season's opening week. Then Edwards got hurt, and Ball was suddenly back to being the centerpiece. How has he responded? Well, let's look at the team numbers since Edwards went down:

• The Timberwolves are 4-2, but the two losses came against teams with five combined losses (the Spurs and Warriors... on those giant winning streaks).
• Minnesota is outscoring opponents by 13.3 points per 100 possessions in Ball's minutes and is getting outscored by 0.7 points per 100 possessions when he rests. 
• Minnesota's true shooting is just under 60% with Ball playing and just over 54% when he sits. For the season, both Jaden McDaniels and Ayo Dosunmu see their true shooting jump at least 14 percentage points when they play with Ball.

It's a tiny sample, but thus far, Ball is impacting his new Timberwolves teammates in much the same way he affected his former Hornets (don't worry, we'll get to them!). Everyone else's life gets vastly simpler on offense when they're fortunate enough to play with LaMelo Ball. Even without Edwards, he's more than kept the Timberwolves afloat. When Edwards eventually returns, this team is a genuine contender in the Western Conference.

Three biggest losers of the week

1. Charlotte Hornets

With Ball, the Hornets had the best offense in the NBA from early December through the end of last season. Well, without him, they're last. By a mile. They're last in basically everything. No team has a lower true shooting percentage. No team turns the ball over. Ready for a jarring stat? We covered Oklahoma City's "no pass" offense earlier. Well, the Thunder are averaging more assists than the Hornets this season ... on 65 fewer passes per game.

The Hornets knew they were getting worse when they made the trade. It was a conscious choice: take a step back, take a few spins in the revamped lottery, accumulate assets that could be flipped later. The Hornets felt like they were destined to be a perpetual middle-of-the-standings team with Ball. They traded him in the hopes that getting worse now could make them championship contenders later.

Their fans probably could have lived with a small step back. What we've seen thus far has been a disaster. Not all of it is their fault. They've barely had Coby White or Kon Knueppel -- and Knueppel will be about another four weeks at least with a hamstring strain. Brandon Miller, the other cornerstone here who just signed a $209 million contract, is shooting 26% from 3 and below 36% from the floor because of how overburdened he currently is. A step back may have been the idea, but nobody thought it would be this bad, nor did many assume Ball would be this good for Minnesota. It doesn't change Charlotte's long-term outlook, but it makes the present that much more painful. All of the goodwill from last year's turnaround has seemingly evaporated.

2. The feel-good Western Conference middle class

We came into the season relatively certain about how the Western Conference was tiered. The Spurs and Thunder were at the top. The Lakers, the Wolves, the Houston Rockets and the Denver Nuggets would land between No. 3 and No. 6 in some order. After that? Well, no one gave much thought to the Play-In Tournament. The East was supposed to be the deep conference. That's an opinion we cycle through every four or five years. Every year is supposed to be the East's year, and then it isn't. When the Memphis Grizzlies and Portland Trail Blazers were lighting on the world on fire, it seemed as though the West's depth had triumphed yet again.

It still is, on balance. The Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks, for instance, are strongly exceeding expectations. But the early excitement over Memphis and Portland, at least, is starting to wane. The Grizzlies traded a six-game winning streak for a three-game losing streak. The Blazers walked into the hardest stretch of their schedule thus far, took a loss to the Lakers and then got smacked around by the Spurs. With two games against the Thunder coming, Portland is seemingly coming back down to Earth. For a moment there, the New Orleans Pelicans looked as though they were figuring some things out on a four-game winning streak, but back-to-back losses have them out of the Play-In picture, at least for now.

These teams are still better than we figured they'd be, and there's still a bit of wiggle room in the West. Denver, for instance, looks enormously vulnerable. But the Spurs have won eight in a row. The Thunder have righted the ship. The Lakers, Wolves and Rockets are all as good as we thought or better. For a moment there, it looked like we were due some surprises out West. For now, it seems as though order has mostly been restored.

3. Lottery reform

It is still much, much too early to draw any meaningful conclusions about lottery reform, but an early topic thus far this season has been how bad the bottom of the league still is despite the removal of the tanking incentive. With almost three weeks in the books, there are seven teams with either one or two victories. Between those seven teams, there are only three total victories over teams above .500. The Kings beat the Mavericks... without Kyrie Irving. The Orlando Magic beat the Toronto Raptors... without Kawhi Leonard, and their victory over the New York Knicks at least came with Jalen Suggs in the lineup. If Suggs and Paolo Banchero were healthy, the Magic would likely not be in this class.

Essentially, when the worst teams are playing against the best ones at anything resembling full strength, they've been hopeless. Inevitably, a certain number of teams are just going to be bad whether or not they're trying to lose. In fact, given this year's specific outlook, it's not even clear how motivated any of these bottom-tier teams are to actually win. The relegation zone isn't a threat to the Milwaukee Bucks, Brooklyn Nets, Utah Jazz or Los Angeles Clippers because they don't actually control their own first-round picks. You could argue that being in the relegation zone would actually be advantageous to the Chicago Bulls in order to minimize their odds of getting a top-five pick in the bad 2027 draft, because doing so, in concert with their No. 4 pick in 2026, would lock them out of a top-five pick in the stronger 2028 class.

NBA relegation zone predictions: Ranking the 7 worst teams in the race to avoid the bottom of the standings

Sam Quinn

We might not see the sort of overt tanking we've gotten in years past, but the question here is whether or not that will actually matter. With so many of these teams having minimal incentives to win, will they still shut down key players midway through the season? Even if they don't, will attendance and television ratings be better for these teams down the stretch just because they're nominally trying? We're months away from even starting to get answers to these questions, but any notions that reform would create 30 competitive teams have been quickly dismissed. Even in October and November, some teams are already pretty tough to watch.