The NBA season is not so young anymore. Players performing well aren’t just off to good starts. They’re having good seasons. Players on the other side may not be guaranteed a downtrodden 82 games, but it’s late enough for questions to arise.

Let’s open up the notebook and run through five trends that have caught my eye since opening night:

It doesn’t matter if Giannis Antetokounmpo’s shooting is real. What matters is whether the rest of the league believes in it.

Flash back to the Milwaukee Bucks’ win over the Charlotte Hornets this past weekend, when Grant Williams decided he was guarding not just this generation’s Shaquille O’Neal but also a man who could hurt him from the midrange.

Antetokounmpo had just drained a couple of long 2s over Williams in the previous minute. The next play, with the two-time NBA MVP rushing endline to endline in transition, appeared as a copy of the previous one, when Williams sagged back toward the basket and Antetokoumpo pulled up for a 15-footer from the left elbow.

Once again, Antetokounmpo controlled the basketball. Once again, he headed to the same spot. Once again, he hesitated, telegraphing that he might rise for a jumper. This time, Williams wouldn’t commit the same error. Instead of drifting into the paint, hoping to protect against a human Cybertruck capable of running over anyone, the 25-year-old changed his strategy. After allowing two consecutive swishes, Williams stepped up on Antetokounmpo.

Uh-oh.

This was a problem — and not because of anything Williams did wrong. A regular human cannot impede a vehicle like this.

Antetokounmpo raced one dribble left and finished with that opposite-hand layup he loves so much for the easy 2.

A man who can bully his way into the paint whenever he pleases is now hitting jumpers as well. It’s too early to know if Antetokounmpo is now a midrange hound. But after that started with the basketball world jeering the Bucks, preying on Doc Rivers and framing them as a lost team, Milwaukee has won six of seven. At 8-9, it’s tied for fifth in the decrepit Eastern Conference. And amid all the chaos have been hidden blossoms 12 to 16 feet from the basket at Fiserv Forum.

Antetokounmpo, the most-dominant down-low player of his generation, is draining midrange shots like never before. And they’re not coming at the expense of more efficient looks.

Those uncomfortable 3s he used to hoist are now a step or two inside the arc, where he’s more accurate. Fifty-six percent of his shots are at the rim, the second-highest percentage of his career. And when he doesn’t get all the way there, when a defense forms a wall around the paint, he’s been a weapon.

Antetokounmpo is shooting 49 percent on long 2s, the highest percentage of his career by far. He’s nailing seemingly every runner and hook shot he tries. He’s at 54 percent from the short midrange (10-16 feet), where he shoots just 37 percent for his career.

Maybe this is just a fiery 17 games. Or maybe a generationally hard worker got better. At least in that moment, Williams, a smart player, seemed to believe he was defending a man who could attack him from places beyond just the paint.

Unspoken change in Minnesota

Even during a magical season that ended with a run to the conference finals, the Minnesota Timberwolves needed an adult in the room. Amid a hot-and-cold start, they are missing that guy — and not because of anything to do with the Karl-Anthony Towns trade.

Among other issues in Minnesota is a Mike Conley Jr. problem.

The Wolves turned disorganized when Conley wasn’t around last season. When he was present, they crossed their T’s, dotted their I’s and perfectly executed that impossible squiggly with their script, capital Z’s. But the version of Conley that showed up in 2023-24, the same heady one that has persisted in the NBA for the past decade and a half, hasn’t shown up through Minnesota’s first 16 games. And the Timberwolves, off to an 8-8 start in the wake of the Earth-shattering Towns trade that has affected success as well as identity, could use him.

Conley missed his third consecutive game Sunday, when the Timberwolves played the Boston Celtics close but eventually lost. When he’s been healthy, he hasn’t looked like the same guy he did a season ago. He’s 37 years old now, a step slower and shooting just 32 percent from the field (and a dreadful 28 percent on 2-pointers). And yet, even when he performs like this, the Wolves need him.

His teammates still shoot better when he’s on the court. The offense overall is still better when he plays than when he doesn’t. The Wolves could still use that adult in the room, the guy to limit the silly turnovers or to get them into their sets. And they would be better off if that adult made more than a third of his shots.

They’ve tried a couple of starters in Conley’s stead. Nickeil Alexander-Walker entered the first unit a couple of times. Donte DiVincenzo, who finally knocked in some 3s during the Boston game, started the most recent one.

The Wolves do not operate the same way today that they did before trading away Towns. Julius Randle is more of a ball stopper, someone who wants to receive the rock, prod, jab step, then go. Towns would keep the offense flowing. If he didn’t have a play, he’d go into a dribble-handoff or receive a pass and then attack the man closing out on him. There is less space in the paint now, though Minnesota is still plus-4.3 per 100 possessions during the Randle-Rudy Gobert lineups, per Cleaning the Glass. Edwards is pulling up for more 3s than ever.

Timberwolves players are inexplicably missing shots. DiVincenzo is a sharpshooter with blunt results right now, somehow hitting only 33 percent of his 3s. And Conley can’t find a bucket.

Minnesota doesn’t need the All-Star version of its point guard. Conley is past that stage of his career. But once he’s ready to play again, the Wolves would be in better shape if they got the version of him that existed just seven months ago.

Does any other defender move his feet as well as Amen Thompson, one of the many catalysts of the Houston Rockets’ relentless defense?

The Rockets are throwing Thompson on anyone: point guards, scoring guards, big wings; they’re using him at center in small lineups. He’s yet to meet a ballhandler he can’t stay in front of — and that’s affecting his hand placement.

Drive toward Thompson at your own risk. He slides his feet side to side as quickly as most runners churn their own ones forward. He’s mostly stayed away from fouling and has mastered a little underhand steal, knocking away basketballs as if he’s Jennie Finch, a low-risk windup that isn’t likely to hack anyone or open up lanes to the hoop.

Look at him poke the basketball away from Luka Dončić on this crunchtime play against the Dallas Mavericks, not reaching from the side or the top, where he could end up sending Dončić to the free-throw line, but instead rising from underneath the dribble:

Thompson has turned this into his thing now. He got the San Antonio Spurs’ Stephon Castle with the same move too. A player can only pull this off with a pathological ability to stay in front of just about everyone — as Thompson has sported so far this season.

The Rockets are the Western Conference’s surprise team, sitting at 12-6 and in third place in part because of a stifling defense. It’s as if the team has merged the personalities of head coach Ime Udoka and notorious irritant Dillon Brooks, then taken on that persona for itself. Thompson is one of many leading the charge.

Few moments in basketball are more enthralling right now than when Houston uses him at center. The Rockets don’t score in those lineups, but they don’t give up buckets either, often switching everything, gunning for steals and allowing just 102.4 points per 100 possessions, which would rank first in the NBA if it belonged to a team, according to Cleaning the Glass.

The Rockets are as in your face as it gets. And that starts with Thompson.

Chris Paul has a piece of advice for his rookie: Chill out … just a bit.

After Stephon Castle rose for an enthusiastic dunk during the Spurs’ recent win over the Utah Jazz, Paul reminded him not to exhaust himself for no reason. “You can just lay it in,” he told the 20-year-old.

But so far in Castle’s short NBA career, if he has the chance to go full-throttle, he takes it.

He’s averaged 14.3 points and 4.5 assists since entering San Antonio’s starting lineup three weeks ago. His defense is NBA-ready. He doesn’t hesitate when presented with the opportunity to chuck up a big-time shot. If he cares about his misses, it doesn’t show. No play better exemplifies his persistence than one from the Spurs’ upset of the Golden State Warriors over the weekend, when Castle caught all air on a wide-open crunch-time jumper, then immediately stole the basketball back from two-time MVP Stephen Curry.

It used to take time for young players to adapt to professional defense. Now, it seems a few guys every year enter the league and stifle scorers immediately. Just in the past couple of seasons, Thompson, Victor Wembanyama, Chet Holmgren, Donovan Clingan, Ryan Dunn, Dereck Lively II and others (no, no one is forgetting about Toumani Camara) have been impact defenders from day one.

The Spurs, meanwhile, have officially upgraded from feisty to scrappy. They’re 9-8, just beat the top two teams in the West (the Warriors and Oklahoma City Thunder) in a four-day span, are witnessing a renaissance season from Paul and haven’t even had all their best players for most of the year.

The West is a nightmare, and Castle and company are making sure trips to San Antonio aren’t any fun either.

OG Anunoby’s grenades

The 10-7 New York Knicks have underwhelmed, but not because of OG Anunoby, who has guarded like one of the league’s staunchest defenders, has cut like a letter opener and is hitting 3s from all over the court like never before. He went for a career-best 40 points during Monday’s blowout in Denver. But the Knicks would actually be better off if his career-best shooting were slightly worse than the 52/42/83 line.

Anunoby has developed a nasty habit. If he has the ball with only a second or two remaining on the shot clock, instead of putting up an emergency jumper, he will pass it up, relaying the basketball to a teammate with a far worse chance of even touching the rim (if he has the time to shoot at all).

This is not the only late-clock grenade Anunoby has fired at a teammate this season. On other plays, they’ve gotten up a jumper but just barely in time.

The Knicks offense is humming, but even so, they will miss all the shots they don’t take.

— The Athletic’s Eric Nehm contributed to this story.

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(Top photo of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Vučević: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)