5 biggest surprises of the 2025–26 NBA season so far
· Yahoo Sports
Every NBA season starts with a set of assumptions. Certain teams are supposed to be good. Certain players are supposed to take a step forward. The standings, when they finally arrive, are mostly meant to confirm what everyone already believed going into October.
The 2025–26 season had other ideas. Within the first two weeks, there were 19 forty-point games leaguewide; a number that made people wonder whether scoring had permanently broken defense, or whether defense had simply given up. Players who were penciled in as role contributors were suddenly putting up All-Star numbers. A team with no business competing at the top of the conference was doing exactly that. A rookie showed up and immediately looked like he had been in the league for years. And a role player in Los Angeles spent the opening week looking like the best player on the planet.
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These are not small surprises. They are the stories that made analysts rewrite their preseason takes, and fans reconsider everything they thought they knew about this season. Here are the five biggest.
5. The Detroit Pistons going 60–22
Detroit finishing with a 60-win season was one of the most genuinely shocking team stories in the league. Nobody outside the organisation predicted it, and the fact that Cade Cunningham and Jalen Duren both earned All-NBA recognition in the same season made it clear this was not a fluke built on a soft schedule. The Pistons went from the worst record in NBA history just two seasons ago to one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference, and the speed of that turnaround had no real precedent in modern basketball.
4. VJ Edgecombe arriving as a fully formed player
Edgecombe averaged 19 points, five rebounds, and four assists per game as a rookie on 47 percent shooting and 44 percent from three. Those are not numbers from a player finding his feet. Those are numbers from a player who was never lost in the first place. The 76ers expected him to contribute eventually. Not immediately, not like this, and not to the point where he was a Rookie of the Year frontrunner from the opening month.
3. The Spurs without De’Aaron Fox
San Antonio lost Fox to injury before the season started and was supposed to struggle. Instead, they played like one of the better teams in the Western Conference. Wembanyama showed he could carry a team, Castle stepped into a bigger role without blinking, and the Spurs quietly became one of the most compelling stories in the league. The surprise was not that they were good. It was how good they were when every expectation pointed the other way.
2. Austin Reeves’ opening week
Reeves averaged 35.8 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 8.5 assists in the first week of the season on 58 percent shooting from the field. It looked like a typo. It was not. He was not going to keep that up for 82 games, and he did not need to. What those seven days proved about his development and his importance to the Lakers reshaped how the rest of the league saw him for the rest of the year.
1. The League-wide scoring explosion
Nineteen forty-point games in the first two weeks. Aaron Gordon is posting 50. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander dropped a career-high 55 with 26 free throw attempts in a single game. The 2025–26 season opened with scoring numbers the modern NBA had never seen, and the question of whether offense had permanently outpaced defense dominated the first month of the year. It made the opening weeks among the most entertaining basketball in recent memory, and the conversation it sparked about the state of the game has not yet stopped.