NBA Panic Meter: Why Nuggets, Bucks have some cause for alarm, plus 76ers await Joel Embiid’s return

Is a little more than two weeks into an NBA season too soon to start drawing any sort of conclusions about anything? Of course it is! But panic forms, and spreads quickly, across the sports landscape, and there are definitely some impatient nerves running though more than a few teams. 

Five of them are listed below, with their panic level ranked on a scale of 1-10. 

Milwaukee Bucks: 9

I can’t put the panic meter at a full 10 a few weeks into the season, but this Bucks situation looks bad. Another loss on Monday (although they at least played the undefeated Cavaliers tough in this one without Giannis Antetokounmpo) puts them at 1-6, tied for the worst record in the league with the Jazz. Milwaukee’s only win came on opening night against a Sixers team that was missing Joel Embiid and Paul George. 

If you want to convince yourself the eventual return of Khris Middleton, who is in individual decline himself, is going to turn this all around, more power to you, but there’s certainly a darker ending looming here. 

Last week, CBS Sports NBA Insider Bill Reiter reported that confidence is growing around the league that Giannis could become available for trade if the Bucks go south. Well, if a bottom-10 offense and defense with the league’s seventh-worst net rating isn’t south, your compass is different than mine. 

Damian Lillard has had three big shooting games sandwiched around four games in which he went 6 for 33 from 3-point range. That has too often been the pattern for Lillard in Milwaukee. He has not been an every-night star in the way the Bucks need him to be to justify the defensive decline that came with flipping Jrue Holiday for him in the first place. 

The offense looks stale. The energy feels like a corpse much of the time. Even though the two stars have largely done their thing individually, the two-man machine that was supposed to be Lillard and Giannis is more awkward than anticipated as neither is most comfortable off the ball and Giannis doesn’t offer the pick-and-pop shooting option that Brook Lopez does. 

As such, the Bucks are leaning on more two-man actions with Lillard and Lopez. In fact, the team basically sinks to the bottom of the ocean when Lopez is off the court, falling to a pathetic 101.3 and 121.7 offensive and defensive rating, respectively, when he sits, per Cleaning the Glass.

Even with Lillard and Giannis — who are combining for 60 points per game on 63% true-shooting — on the court, the Bucks become the worst offense and defense in the league while being outscored by 33 points per 100 possessions without Lopez, per Cleaning the Glass. 

That likely won’t continue. Middleton will certainly help. But a team that is hanging by this thin of a thread while being that dependent on a 36-year-old Lopez who is, in fact, shooting just 28% from 3 himself? Troubling, to say the least. 

So who does that leave to captain a turnaround? Doc Rivers? The guy who holds everyone accountable besides himself? The guy who dropped thinly veiled blame for his shortcomings on Ben Simmons and James Harden at his last stop? 

Even when Rivers inherited the Bucks job, he preempted any criticism he might face by suggesting it was some exceedingly tall task to coach a team that was 30-13 without him. Imagine how good a team that is 30-13 with a supposedly bad coach should be with a good one. Well, perhaps Doc just isn’t a good one, because the Bucks are 20-28 since he took over. 

Again, I can’t take the panic meter to a 10 this early in the season. But you can bet alarms are ringing all over this organization as we speak. 

Denver Nuggets: 7

This team just doesn’t look good enough to contend. On Monday, Nikola Jokic had to put up a 28-14-13 triple-double to go along with Russell Westbrook’s best game of the year for the Nuggets to beat the 2-6 Raptors, at home, by two points. 

It was the same story the Monday before. It took 40 points and 10 assists from Jokic to squeak past the Raptors in overtime. The night after that, Jokic had to stack up 29 points, 18 rebounds and 16 assists to beat the Nets, again in overtime. 

There is a very thin line between Denver’s 4-3 record — further propped up by a win over the 1-6 Jazz — and a 2-5 or even 1-6 start. Hell, Jokic’s 41 points and seven 3-pointers wasn’t even enough to beat the Clippers. 

The point is, the three-time MVP can only do so much; indeed, the Nuggets are the league’s worst offense being outscored by 23 points per 100 possessions without Jokic on the floor, per CTG. Denver’s bench is genuinely helpless. 

In a vacuum, the loss of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope shouldn’t take what was a legit contender last season and turn it into a potential play-in team this season, but it’s a trickle down effect. Everyone gets stretched just a little but more. Christian Braun isn’t there to lift the reserves because he’s bumped up to KCP’s role now. Russell Westbrook is being asked to be the best player off Denver’s bench, and anonymous scouts have been quoted as saying he should be cut. He is shooting 28%. 

For Denver to have a chance to keep pace in the West, Jamal Murray needs to be as good as he typically is in the playoffs (excluding last year, for the most part) all season, but he’s making under 38% of his shots so far. Michael Porter Jr. has had a couple nice games but he’s just not a consistent producer commensurate with the max money he makes, and he’s pretty one dimensional at that. 

The simple truth is that even with the best player in the world, the Nuggets are operating at a talent deficit against the better teams and are barely squeaking past the bad teams. 

I’ll put the panic meter a bit lower than Milwaukee because I will never rule out the possibility of a Jokic-led team getting it’s you-know-what together, and I still believe in Murray as an All-Star-level player, even if he isn’t likely to ever make an actual All-Star team in the West. This team has been together and won big for quite a long time, so they get a leash. But it’s shortening every day. 

Looking for more NBA coverage? John Gonzalez, Bill Reiter, Ashley Nicole Moss and special guests dive deep into the league’s biggest storylines daily on the Beyond the Arc podcast.

New Orleans Pelicans: 6

New Orleans is 3-5 and has looked even worse than the second-worst record in the West would indicate. The three wins are over the Bulls, Blazers and Pacers, the latter of whom is nearly registering on the early panic meter themselves. 

The Pelicans check in with the 22nd-ranked offense and 28th-ranked defense. Only the Jazz have a worse point differential than New Orleans’ minus-9.0 per 100 possessions. They’ve already lost to the Blazers two times, by a combined 40 points. 

The shot diet is going to be tough to live well on. Only the Kings, on the back of DeMar DeRozan, take more long mid-range shots per game that the Pelicans, per Cleaning the Glass, and only five teams take fewer 3s. 

Rookie big man Yves Missi has been pretty great, but the center situation still basically rules the Pelicans out against teams with elite big men, at the very least. They give up the league’s highest percentage of offense rebounds and shot attempts inside of four feet, per CTG. They are, in essence, bleeding internally. 

Zion Williamson has played in five games, and he has shot a combined 26 for 39 in two of them. Pretty good, right? Sure, until you factor in the 12-for-47 line in the other three. He’s not dominating every night, and he needs to for New Orleans to even have a chance against real competition. 

Brandon Ingram has, for the most part, been spectacular. Perhaps that’s a good thing in raising his trade value, but if not, the fit remains a tight squeeze because he’s not an off-ball player and neither is Zion. It doesn’t help that CJ MCCollum is hurt or that Herb Jones has missed time or that Dejounte Murray went down int he first game of the season. 

New Orleans feels like a team that should be pretty good but just isn’t for a few glaring reasons, the lack of size, Zion’s inconsistency and Ingram’s fit and difficult shot diet chief among them. It’s early, but in the big picture, these do not feel like things that are just going to randomly improve without an Ingram trade. 

Minnesota Timberwolves: 4

The Wolves don’t rate too highly a panic meter at this point, but there are some concerns. For instance, the offense falls off a cliff when Julius Randle sits. That’s not optimal to be that dependent on a guy who is sort of a weird with Rudy Gobert as a second non-spacer for Anthony Edwards to begin with, and also, how long is Randle going to keep shooting 60% from the field and 46% from 3? 

Minnesota is built to win with defense, and Randle largely cripples that pursuit. But they need his offense to even stay afloat on that end. It’s often these sorts of offense-defense lineup dilemmas that turn out to be an Achilles heel for teams trying to make the leap into top-tier contention. 

Naz Reid factors heavily into this discussion. Will the Wolves ever go back to the two-big starting lineup they deployed with Karl-Anthony Towns and Gobert by flipping Reid in for Randle? In small samples, the defense has boomed in two-big lineups but the offense has dragged. 

Play Reid, who is making 48% of his nearly five 3-pointers per game, together with Randle while Gobert sits, and naturally the offense jumps but the defense craters. All the tradeoffs add up to a 4-3 record with the No. 11 offense and No. 13 defense entering play on Wednesday. 

The defense needs be considerably more impactful, and chances are it will. The perimeter guys are too good and Gobert is too proven an anchor. But there is cause for at least some mild concern on offense, where the Randle clog, even as well as he’s shooting himself, is forcing Edwards into almost 12 3-point attempts every night, nearly double his average last season. 

Sure, he’s making them at a 45% clip, but that almost certainly won’t continue. So again, there are some structural concerns here with the loss of Towns as a spacer and the (so far) declining defense to pick up even more slack than it already had to last season. 

Philadelphia 76ers: 3

On paper, it’s tough to imagine a worse start for a team that made a huge offseason splash to theoretically launch itself into top-shelf contention. The Sixers are 1-5 with their lone win being an overtime job against Indiana. Joel Embiid shoved a columnist. Tyrese Maxey is having to score 30 PPG on 25 shots just to end up with the 26th-ranked offense. 

All that said, how much can you really panic when Embiid hasn’t played a single game and Paul George has played one? Monday night was George’s Philly debut and they took the 6-1 Suns to the wire and looked by far the best they have all season. 

The vibes are pretty rough around the edges of this team right now, no doubt about that. There’s definitely some concern because bad vibes can compound and Embiid might not ultimately be active consistently enough for the team to ever gain the collective rhythm it needs. 

But that’s a concern for down the road. A few weeks in without Embiid and George part of the mix is just too early to register anything more than a limited level of concern.