Two weeks into the 2021-22 NBA season, it's time to take stock of which surprising early results are legitimate and which might not be sustainable over the course of the league's first planned 82-game schedule in three years.
Already, there have been plenty of surprises, including the teams atop the Eastern Conference standings. With last year's four conference semifinalists in the East off to slow starts for a variety of reasons, three teams that missed the playoffs in 2020-21 are ahead of them, along with two more (the New York Knicks and Washington Wizards) that were quickly dispatched in the opening round.