Buy or Sell NBA's Worst Starts to 2023-24 (2024)

Depending on where you put the emphasis, the phrase "it's a long season" can mean two very different things for NBA teams off to difficult starts.

One one hand, it can read as a consolation. We're aren't even 10 percent of the way through the 2023-24 campaign, and for teams whose rough early play is coming as a surprise, there's some optimism in acknowledging how much of the schedule remains. The months ahead are opportunities to turn things around.

The flip side is bleaker. Some squads that stumble out of the gate look at the sheer volume of unplayed games ahead as a slog filled with more losses, declining morale and all the general pain that comes with a rotten record.

All of the teams we'll cover here have started out poorly—if not in overall performance, at least in specific areas that were hard to see coming. Let's sort out which of them should be excited and which should be concerned about the long season they've only just begun.

No team needs a do-over like the Memphis Grizzlies. Unfortunately for them, hitting reset won't magically erase Steven Adams' season-ending knee injury or cause Ja Morant's 25-game suspension to disappear.

Those issues are the main reasons behind Memphis' 1-6 start and cellar-dwelling status in the Western Conference standings, and they aren't going anywhere.

These struggles weren't difficult to see coming, particularly on offense. Adams' screen-setting and offensive rebounding have been vital to the Grizzlies' survival in the half-court since the moment he arrived in 2021. His presence on the floor coincided with bumps of 6.4 and 5.5 points per 100 possessions on offense in 2021-22 and 2022-23, respectively.

Despite his team's occasional success without him over the years, Morant's presence on the court has boosted Memphis' offensive efficiency in each of the last three seasons.

Without those two, the Grizzlies lost their first six games before finally notching a win against a lowly Portland Trail Blazers team playing without Anfernee Simons or Scoot Henderson. Entering play Wednesday, those Blazers were the only team with a worse offensive rating on the season than the Grizzlies.

New addition Marcus Smart hasn't been up to the task of simultaneously replacing Morant at the point and Dillon Brooks on the wing, and Desmond Bane looks overburdened as a primary playmaker so far. His usage rate is up to career-high levels, but he's averaging more turnovers and fewer assists than he did a year ago.

There's a healthy version of this Grizzlies team that would have pushed beyond 50 wins and competed for one of the West's top four playoff spots, which is exactly what happened in each of the last two seasons. But Adams isn't coming back this year, and Morant may return to a team that has lost too many games to do anything but put together a desperate push for a berth in the play-in tournament.

Verdict: Buy

Winners in just two of their first six games, the Sacramento Kings haven't exactly made good on the hype from head coach Mike Brown, who railed against complacency all offseason and tried to sell his team on the idea that "good is the enemy of great."

Nobody should bat an eye at a Kings team hanging around the bottom 10 in defensive efficiency. With no meaningful personnel changes to the group that ranked 25th in that stat a year ago, there was never a reason to believe Sacramento had much upside on that end of the floor.

However, it's jarring to see the Kings struggling to put the ball in the basket. After all, the 2022-23 version of the team set the all-time record for scoring efficiency. The difference: Last year's team had a healthy De'Aaron Fox, and this one doesn't.

Fox sprained his ankle during an overtime win against the Los Angeles Lakers on Oct. 29. At the time, he was averaging 31.3 points and 6.0 assists on a 48.6/37.0/81.0 shooting split, riding last year's momentum and setting himself up for another All-NBA season and perhaps a flirtation with significant MVP votes. He hasn't played since.

The version of the Kings we saw during the three games Fox played was 2-1 with a plus-3.1 net rating and the No. 8 offense in the league. Those are the real Kings, and they'll be back as soon as Fox is.

Verdict: Sell

The Washington Wizards are absolutely legit. Which is to say they're legitimately terrible, probably ticketed for the NBA's worst record and are OK with that result.

This is exactly what every clear-eyed, right-thinking observer expected after the Wizards dealt away Bradley Beal and Kristaps Porziņģis as part of a long-awaited teardown that also included restructuring the front office. Generally speaking, NBA teams have to get worse before they get better. Washington aced the first part through its first six games, sitting at 1-5 with the worst net rating in the league.

To avoid piling on, not everything the Wizards are doing is aggressively horrible. They're just outside the top 10 in effective field-goal percentage, and they do a surprisingly solid job forcing opponent turnovers. But Washington puts up no resistance whatsoever on defense and is allowing teams to post an effective field-goal percentage over 60.0 percent that is far and away the highest in the NBA.

There are still reasons to watch the Wizards, not the least of which being Jordan Poole's attempts to turn bad shot selection and lackadaisical play into performance art.

What is this, exactly?

The Wizards will pull out of this funk eventually. Like, say, around 2027 or so.

Verdict: Buy

The Cleveland Cavaliers fell in three of their first four games and later dropped their first In-Season Tournament contest against the Indiana Pacers on Nov. 3. To put it mildly, that wasn't the kind of start most saw coming from a club that went 51-31 and posted the second-highest net rating in the league last year.

Weren't Evan Mobley and Darius Garland supposed to take another leap? Wasn't Donovan Mitchell set up to make an MVP push? Shouldn't free-agent signee Max Strus have instantly filled the small forward void?

As it turns out, the Cavs aren't on the road to an all-timer of a disappointing season. Three of their four best players—Garland, Mitchell and Jarrett Allen—missed time due to injury during that rough stretch, as did key rotation piece Isaac Okoro. When Cleveland downed the Golden State Warriors on Nov. 5 behind strong games from all five healthy starters and a suffocating defensive effort, we saw its true identity.

The difficult first week was little more than a blip, and we should assume these Cavs will spend the next several months smothering opposing offenses, building on last year's breakout season and generally performing like the best East team nobody talks about.

Put it this way: The Cavs are more likely to finish in the same tier as the title-chasing Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks than they are to wind up in the jumbled mess below that top echelon. Soon enough, nobody will remember that 2-4 start.

Verdict: Sell

The Utah Jazz have lost six of their first eight games in 2023-24 and boast the second-worst net rating in the league, trailing only the incomprehensibly inept Wizards.

Flash back to this time a year ago, and Utah, theoretically a rebuilding tanker, was 9-3. Call it a failure of timing, as Victor Wembanyama was the prize for teams bringing up the rear of the 2022-23 standings. No such reward awaits Utah this June.

The Jazz are having a rough time on defense, allowing 119.6 points per 100 possessions. The results are actually even worse with ace rim-protector Walker Kessler in the game. While that particular stat should normalize (Kessler will be in the running for an All-Defensive spot), the Jazz are going to struggle on the offensive end as well.

An underwhelming point guard rotation headlined by Talen Horton-Tucker is coughing up the ball at alarming rates and failing to generate reliably good shots for Utah's scoring threats. Rookie Keyonte George is taking some early lumps and should eventually earn major minutes, but there's almost no precedent for a competent rookie-led offense with this little surrounding talent.

The Jazz are in for a painful season, one that may leave fans wondering where all these losses were last year, when they might have earned the team a top pick in a loaded draft.

Verdict: Buy

Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.