Early season SURPRISES: Minnesota Timberwolves, Orlando Magic and Houston Rockets | Yahoo Sports

Early season SURPRISES: Minnesota Timberwolves, Orlando Magic and Houston Rockets | Yahoo Sports

Next one up for me I love that our early season success stories aren’t going away I love that Minnesota is still at the top of the West right like and not only at the top of the West they just smacked around the Bucks and the Clippers on the

Road by 20 plus and they they’ll go through periods where they they look up and down and the offense can get you know shaky and Station to Station and when they don’t have my conly on the floor cannot be get disorganized and you’re relying a lot on Anthony Edwards

You know reading the game out or if Carl towns is going to be able to make passes through Tight Windows and all that kind of stuff but that defense travels the energy and the effort travels and when they lock in they can shut off even Elite teams water like they showed

Against the Clippers like they’re not that they’re not going anywhere maybe you know we’ll see how they are in a playoff series but it wasn’t like oh that’s a nice story for six weeks and then it’s over you know um and there’s and there’s a bunch of them like that

You know the uh the Orlando Magic are still there I think they’re seven and four since they got France Vagner back in the lineup five games over 500 sixth in the East like better than a coin flip to make the top six depending on your projection systems and Indiana weathered

The halberton absence and they’re right there in that mix too right there with Philly and Orlando and Miami um still right up there at the top of the east or top of the east in offensive efficiency the Thunder you know duh we just talked about SGA but that whole roster like

Youth is being served there uh and you know they’re right in the mix for the top of the West so like even the like the the one that was sort of an early rabbit that has fallen back to the pack was the rockets and even within that like yeah they’ve been bad

Since Christmas basically but they’re still a top five defense like like a lot of the of what we saw early in the season in terms of oh that’s something worth paying attention to has remained worth paying attention to and as you get into the dog days of the Season that

Stuff can be kind of tricky to come by so I kind of like that it wasn’t just like the the the league has resolved to its sort of familiar formula by the time we get to to the midpoint there’s still some stuff that kind of caught us by surprise that’s continuing to happen

Yeah no that’s a great call out maybe my favorite one since we uh started the Love Letter segment in part because I I think you’re spot on that I know I’ve been if you want to call it guilty of this before is a writer and specifically a writer that likes to highlight funny

Unusual this doesn’t happen that often type stories or things like You’ mentioned the nerkish story I had where he was getting hit in the face all the time stories that do happen all the time but are weird or things that happen all the time that are weird uh for instance

I really really really wanted to write about the Kings and how great a season they were having last year because it was kind of like a comet situation like this doesn’t happen and I tend to want to do those early in a season before they’re not actually the case anymore

And so absolutely like to see the Timberwolves there to see Oklahoma City there as granted like there nothing fluky about what they’re doing but age-wise this doesn’t happen much where you have teams that perform this well and you know you you mentioned the magic you mentioned the rockets in their

Defense all those things are are spoton and it the staying power of that specifically in a league where there are so many threes being taken and there’s so much variance within the game it it would feel really possible for teams to kind of be hot and then just super super

Cold and out of the race so to see that that actually hasn’t been the case and that it’s actually been a a handful of teams that have won championships the Lakers the Warriors that are kind of struggling and and fighting and clawing their way back into a conversation of

Playoffs playin whatever you want to call it is uh is really really interesting to watch and U so I think that’s a really really good call

Yahoo Sports NBA writer Dan Devine and ESPN’s Chris Herring discuss some early NBA season surprises including the Minnesota Timberwolves, Orlando Magic, Houston Rockets and more.

Watch the full conversation here ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w2bM34PgzM

Be sure to subscribe to “Devine Intervention” – part of the “Ball Don’t Lie” podcast – on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

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