We've now seen two weeks of the 2026-27 season. Is that enough time to draw conclusions? Almost certainly not. No team has even played 10% of its schedule yet, and outlier stretches are inevitable. Case in point: last year's champion, the New York Knicks, had a mostly healthy 2-9 stretch last January that included losses to the tanking Dallas Mavericks and Sacramento Kings. Weird things can happen for a few weeks.

But the first few weeks give us our first taste of who these teams are, and inevitably several will be worse than we expected. We may not have seen enough of a sample at this point to write anyone off completely, but alarm bells are starting to ring in a few notable markets. So let's go through a few of these struggling teams and figure out just how much reason there is to panic after two weeks.

New York Knicks (3-4)

It's easy to forget this now, but New York's championship season started relatively slowly. The Knicks won their first two games, but lost their next three. Mike Brown gave a lengthy and informative monologue about some of their process issues after one of those losses, a road defeat at the hands of the Milwaukee Bucks, and the Knicks righted the ship from there. And aside from that disastrous January stretch, they were mostly great.

It's hard not to look back on that stretch now, as the Knicks limp through a slow start to their title defense. Brown has echoed many of the same criticisms he made last October, most notably the offense's tendency to stand around rather than committing to the all-out motion machine that powered the greatest playoff offense of all time last spring. Perhaps that style wasn't fully replicable for this group across 82 games. That doesn't mean it can't be summoned again in April. All four Knicks losses have come by single digits. I'm going to need more than two weeks before I start worrying about Jalen Brunson's team in clutch settings. The Knicks were the fourth-most efficient late-clock shooting team in the NBA this season. They're 28th so far this season. That's going to change.

Brunson's offseason wrist surgery is a reasonable concern. His shooting is down from everywhere, even the foul line. Maybe he'll need a midseason break to get right. Mikal Bridges is (slowly) starting to make shots again. He needs to be more aggressive, and his on-ball defense has slipped. He was never going to match the intensity he played with in the postseason given his aversion to contact, but he'll have to improve on this front. Karl-Anthony Towns needs to stop fouling, but that's hardly new. Josh Hart is missing too much in the paint, but it's too early to draw conclusions there. OG Anunoby will start making 3s because he always does.

The October Knicks look like a team that spent July, August and September celebrating. If they still look like that in December, panic becomes reasonable. For now, the concerns are relatively light. They have a proven formula, and the big concern that did exist before the season -- the backup center situation -- has thus far been a relative strength. A championship earns you quite a bit more grace than the rest of these teams deserve.

Panic meter: 3 out of 10

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Utah Jazz (1-6)

If you shouldn't write off teams after two weeks, then you certainly shouldn't do so to rookies. Still, Darryn Peterson has certainly been the worst of the much-ballyhooed top four in June's draft. He's never getting to the basket or the line, not quite prerequisites for stardom at his size given his shooting, but enormously important traits for an aspiring star guard. Defense has been an adventure as well, though that's to be expected for a rookie guard, and the early returns on his fit with Keyonte George have been clunky. The Jazz ranking 29th in offense for any stretch in which they're actively trying to win is jarring. Will Hardy had the Jazz in the top five offensively in his debut 2022-23 season before the front office broke up the team at the trade deadline.

One of the motivating factors in selecting Peterson over Rookie of the Year favorite Cameron Boozer was February's acquisition of Jaren Jackson Jr., who is currently sidelined with a torn MCL. Considering his injury history in Memphis, his long-term reliability poses real concerns, yet Utah banked most of its interior defense on him, at least in the short term, when it traded Walker Kessler to the Lakers. It's hard not to wonder about an alternate timeline in which the Jazz chose Boozer and kept Kessler instead of trading for Jackson.

If we were purely talking about the 2026-27 season, the panic meter would be higher here. We're not. The Jazz wanted to be competitive this season. There's still plenty of time for that to happen, and the eventual return of Jusuf Nurkić should help on that front for a Utah team that has gotten very little out of the center position. The real championship window, even under the most optimistic projections, was always a few years down the line. The Jazz are still young and asset-rich. There's plenty of time to right the ship. Teams with more invested in this season specifically can't say the same.

Panic meter: 5 out of 10

Denver Nuggets (3-3)

The defense is bad, but the defense is always bad. They're at the bottom of the league in 3-point volume, but they're always at the bottom of the league in 3-point volume. Aaron Gordon is no longer finding easy looks at the rim nor finishing remotely effectively, but he's spent most of the last two seasons hurt, so he might simply need time to work himself back into a groove. These were predictable concerns. Nikola Jokić was supposed to paper over them like he always does.

So far this year, he hasn't. The best player of the 2020s is suddenly human, and the Nuggets are not built to win with Jokić as anything less than divine. His own defense has been perpetually shaky, but he's always at least been an elite possession-finisher. Since becoming a full-time starter in his second season, he's never had a defensive rebounding rate below 26%. He's below 22% so far this season. He's currently tying his career-high in turnovers per game, and his assists are back to single digits for the first time since 2024.

The real issues, though, are with his scoring. Jokić's overall statistical decline after a midseason knee injury last season was well documented, but what flew under the radar at the time was the precipitous decline in his 3-point shooting following a wrist injury. This was a big driver of last season's playoff upset at the hands of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Rudy Gobert didn't have to defend him out to the 3-point line, and considering Denver's shooting deficiencies elsewhere, that allowed the Wolves to completely take away the rim. Jokić is 7-of-31 from 3 so far this season. More distressingly, his legendary intermediate finishing is slipping. After five straight years in the 95th percentile or better in terms of efficiency, his runner is down to the 86th percentile, according to Synergy Sports. His hook shot, similarly dominant, is in the 50th. His free-throw attempt rate has nearly been cut in half since last season.

There's no point in talking about the defense, the shooting, or the iffy DeMar DeRozan fit if this is the case. Either Jokić is one of the best two or three players in the world or the Nuggets are not to be taken seriously as a championship contender. Jokić has earned a lot more deference than a six-game judgment. Nobody should be surprised if he's the MVP frontrunner in a month. Those other concerns will merit closer looks if he is, because even the idealized version of this roster is pretty flawed. But there's no scenario in which these Nuggets meaningfully contend if Jokić doesn't improve. For now, that's really all that matters here.

Panic meter: 6 out of 10

Phoenix Suns (1-4)

The Suns earn the dubious distinction of becoming the first team of the 2026-27 season to have their dysfunction leaked to the press. Ironically, the thing they're reportedly upset about isn't even really the problem. Chris Haynes has reported that the Suns locker room is frustrated by the roster's lack of a point guard. But Phoenix does have a point guard; it just isn't starting him. Let's compare Phoenix's offense with Collin Gillespie on the floor to how it plays without him, using stats from Cleaning the Glass.

This isn't rocket science. The Suns assist on almost 74% of their made field goals when Gillespie plays and below 60% when he doesn't. Both Devin Booker and Miles Bridges see their true shooting improve by at least eight percentage points with Gillespie on the floor. Starting Jalen Green isn't working. Whether it's in deference to his status as a No. 2 overall pick, his contract or an unfounded belief in his value, this experiment has failed. It's time to start Gillespie and add a more traditional point guard behind him.

So the point guard issues are solvable. You know what the bigger problem is? The Suns have completely lost the high-effort identity they built last season. Let's compare where the Suns ranked last year and this year in some notable areas.

Some of this comes down to bad opponents' shooting luck. Some of it is the absence of Mark Williams, because it has forced Khaman Maluach into a role he simply is not ready for (center has been perhaps Phoenix's biggest problem area). Most of it is rotational. Green isn't exactly known for playing hard or defending. Neither is Miles Bridges. Key players from last year like Jordan Goodwin, Ryan Dunn and Rasheer Fleming are playing less. The Suns simply aren't talented enough to win at the rate they did last year if they aren't playing as hard as they did then.

The Suns don't exactly have a pivot here. They don't control any of their own first-round picks in the seven-year trade window except for a 2032 selection that is currently frozen. They're not going to be able to trade Booker for a haul and reboot this thing, either. He's 30, never gets to the rim and is a declining 3-point shooter who seemingly needs to play next to the right type of playmaking point guard. His supermax contract has albatross potential. After giving up their 2033 first-round pick for Bridges, the Suns largely locked themselves into this core for the foreseeable future. There was never championship upside here, but for a team this heavily leveraged, this level of performance is simply unacceptable.

Panic meter: 7 out of 10

Miami Heat (2-5)

The following clip sums up one of Miami's biggest ongoing challenges:

The Heat have a reputation, and one of its pillars is defensive tenacity. Davion Mitchell obviously has that in spades. But given the unorthodox roster-building challenges of using two big men as your primary shot creators, the Heat have had to embrace players that don't. Tim Hardaway Jr. is on this roster because the Heat so badly need shooting around Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo. He is not yet making shots. He is also doing, well, this, defensively. Klay Thompson is getting hunted more mercilessly than almost any player in the NBA. The Heat have shooting. They have defense. They have alarmingly few players who offer both.

They have even fewer who can create their own shots. Antetokounmpo, Adebayo and Mitchell are the only members of the Heat who generated at least 30% of their made field goals without an assist. Toss Andrew Wiggins onto the pile, and everyone else who averages at least 10 minutes a game is assisted on 80% or more of their made shots.

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Wiggins is averaging career-lows in everything. Miami's relatively egalitarian, pick-and-roll-less offense of a season ago suited him. Adjusting to the Antetokounmpo show thus far has been a struggle. Nikola Jović is veering dangerously close to dead money on their cap for the next four years. None of the core players, not Mitchell, nor Antetokounmpo, nor even Adebayo, is defending at the level expected. This was supposed to be a top-five defense. It's been in the bottom five thus far, and while some opponent shooting regression is coming, Miami's defense is designed to allow the very 3-pointers that are killing it.

Aside from simply having one of the best players in the world, it's hard to point to a distinct strength for the Heat. They're not shooting, defending or rebounding especially well. They're not winning the possession game. They're running quite a bit, but their transition offense ranks 24th in efficiency, according to Synergy Sports. 

This is a team very much still finding itself, but it's one without many of the tools that made Antetokounmpo's Milwaukee teams work or the distinct advantages Miami's vaunted culture typically created for it. This roster is at least a trade or two away, but with minimal draft capital, addressing the holes here will be difficult. It might take multiple transaction cycles to get this right. 

Antetokounmpo is in his 30s now and has a growing history of lower-body injuries. He might not have that many more prime seasons to waste. He's playing at a superstar level right now, and it just isn't clear how equipped Miami is to take advantage of that after giving up practically everything of value it had besides Adebayo just to get him.

Panic meter: 8 out of 10