Aw, that's cute. 

Your little plucky upstart NBA team is off to a much better start than all those so-called "experts" predicted. Just goes to show the kind of heart your team has to defy the odds and shake off the haters. This is going to be a special season, you can feel it. 

Slow your roll. 

Most teams have played fewer than eight games. Christmas is considered the "unofficial start" of the NBA season, and we're not even to Thanksgiving. Not only that, but there are a lot of reasons why all your glee will probably turn to glum. Yes, there are surprises in the NBA every year that we act like are impossible in preseason; we do a lousy job of acknowledging the sheer variance in basketball outcomes outside of the top items (read: the Warriors winning the title). However, there's also a whole lot of smoke and mirrors through Halloween. 

Consider this an exercise in half-truths, as if the glass were only half-full. Here's why your favorite upstart is nothing more than an optical illusion. 

Orlando Magic (5-2)

The Magic are the feel-good story of the season. Not only were they expected to be bad, but they weren't even talked about. They were non-descript. Just another East lottery team.

And then ... this start. The Magic have wins over the Pelicans, Spurs, Cavs and Heat. They boast the second-best offense, ninth-best defense and best overall net rating in the league. It's a pretty great story. 

It's also not going to last. 

Nikola Vucevic is averaging 4.6 3-point attempts per game, and shooting 40 percent on them, coming off a previous career high of shooting just 1.0 per game at 30 percent efficiency. The translation of Vucevic to the perimeter is smart, for sure, it opens up space vs. opponents, giving the Magic's guards more opportunities to make the most of what's on the floor. However, teams are going to start scouting that more effectively. Can he keep up that efficiency as teams start finding ways to take that play away?

Even then, Vucevic isn't even the most glaring outlier. Marreese Speights, Mo Buckets himself, is chucking 4.8 3-pointers per game, shooting 47 percent (!) from deep. Aaron Gordon, who hasn't shot above 30 percent once in his career, is shooting 59 percent from 3-point range. Hint: None of this is sustainable. 

The Magic are also getting huge minutes from career journeyman D.J. Augustin, who's been underrated for years, but he's currently the floor general for the second-best offense in the league. That doesn't sound sustainable, either. 

Cleaning the Glass did an in-depth look and found that an outlier defensively was contributing as well: 

The defensive picture is largely similar. Their shot profile is slightly better, because they have done a great job limiting opponent threes. But they rank 25th in preventing shots at the rim and 27th in rim FG% defense. Their 7th ranked eFG% defense, then, is almost entirely based on opponents missing jumpers: Magic opponents have made 37% of their midrange shots and just 28% of their threes, the lowest mark in the league. Remember what the correlations table told us was the most worthless piece of early season information? Opponent 3PT%. And that's a lot of what's driving Orlando's early defensive success. If opponents had shot even league average from three it would be a difference of around 6 points per game, or enough to drop the Magic into the bottom 10 on defense.

via Is the Magic Real? – Cleaning the Glass. 

Oh, and the Magic are 10th in opponent free-throw percentage, something they have absolutely no control over. Orlando has beaten good teams, and it should feel good about its start. But when the Magic's shooting comes back down to earth, they're going to need some other mechanisms to compensate. 

Boston Celtics (5-2)

The Celtics are playing six players under 24 and their defensive rating is No. 1 in the league at 95.6. They toppled the Spurs Monday night, and have wins against the Bucks and Heat despite missing Gordon Hayward; their win streak stands at five. Impressive! 

It's probably not going to last. 

Look, young teams don't defend well. You have to have a knowledge base of not only sets and schemes but personnel, and in time, they'll face more and more opponents that know how to work around the system. They're surrendering the ninth-most shots in the restricted area, and at a middle-of-the-road efficiency (opponents shooting 62 percent). All of this has led to their giving up the 10th-most points in the paint per game this season. 

One of the biggest reasons for the Celtics' success defensively has been limiting 3-point shots. They average the fourth-fewest allowed 3-point shots in the league per-100 possessions (second least per game due to their slower pace). But look at the teams they've faced: Three of their opponents, the Spurs, Knicks, and Bucks (twice), are all in the bottom 10 in 3-point attempts per-100 possessions. The Celtics have more games surrendering above their average than below, and the sample is skewed by a night where the Knicks (of course) only shot 12 of them. That's going to go up, and it's going to hurt their defense. 

And for all the talk of their offense moving the ball? They're seventh in isolation possessions per game, according to Synergy Sports, and what's more, they're 23rd in efficiency. Most of their plays end with spot-up shots, which is a good thing ... except that they are shooting 34.9 percent on them (46.4 eFG), which is, no surprise, 24th league-wide. 

What does all this mean? The reckoning is coming for the plucky Celtics. 

New York Knicks (3-3)

No, no, I'm kidding on this one. I'm sure Kristaps Porzingis is going to continue to average 29-8. That's definitely going to hold. 

The Knicks are 20th in offensive rating and 17th in defensive rating. Their pythagorean expectation has them right where they are, at 3-3. But it seems worth noting that their last two wins both came against teams playing on a back to back. 

Plus, and Knicks fans know this in their heart of hearts: they're the Knicks. All good and endearing things are just the setup to the inevitable crotch-punch. 

Memphis Grizzlies (5-2)

Memphis is 17th in offense, and are getting crack shooting from Tyreke Evans and Mario Chalmers. We know how this ends. The Grizzlies offense will eventually melt back into burnt cheese, stinking up the refrigerator while their defense stays stout and tough, and they'll work their way to a playoff spot, but little else.

They have wins against the Rockets (twice) and the Warriors, but losses to the Mavericks and Hornets. That's who they've been: They'll knock off contenders and then cost themselves valuable playoff seeding spots with losses to mediocre or bad teams. 

This start has been incredible, but unless Chandler Parsons continues to bomb from deep (55 percent from 3 on 12-of-22 shooting), and Tyreke Evans the same (41 percent), or Dillon Brooks continues to look like a first-round steal, there's probably a big regression around the corner. 

Los Angeles Clippers (4-2)

The schedule giveth, and the schedule taketh away. The Clippers have looked like world beaters for the first 10 days, mostly because they beat the snot out of teams like Phoenix, the pre-Watson-fired Suns and an increasingly suspect Jazz team before needing a Blake Griffin buzzer-beater to get past the Blazers. 

Then the Pistons caught them off guard, and the Warriors dropped a gigantic bucket of cold water on their heads. Losing to the Warriors is fine, but getting hammered into smithereens is too reminiscent of the situation they've been stuck in for years. 

You can't take away the opening wins against the Lakers and Suns away; the Clippers dominated in those games. But their performance since has been average at best. The injury bug already hit with Milos Teodosic, and it looms over the team. There's good talent and the Clippers already have a head start on the rest of their middle-West competition, but in order for it to go right, the Clippers need a lot of good fortune to go their way. 

You know, because their franchise history is so full of that. 

Detroit Pistons (5-3)

The following was written prior to the Pistons' 113-93 loss to the Lakers Tuesday night ...

I'm not going to lie to you. Even if I only half-believe the criticisms delivered for the teams in this post ... I can't find a way to tear down Detroit. The Pistons are top five in fast-break points allowed, second-chance points allowed, points off turnovers allowed and are seventh in points in the paint allowed (per 100 possessions). 

They're shooting well, but not unsustainably hot (13th in effective field-goal percentage). They're dead-last in free-throw rate, which is baffling considering Andre Drummond, until you see that he's shooting 70 percent to start this season after shooting 50 percent through the first seven games last year. Teams will likely go to hack-a-Drummond eventually, but for right now, those are good numbers. 

Their win profile is terrific. When they knocked off the Clippers in L.A., that was good enough. The Warriors on a road-road back to back? That's a schedule loss. Nope. The Pistons foiled my fiendish plot. For right now, at last, they're legit. 

For right now ...