The 2026 NBA playoffs continued Sunday with four more Game 1s in the first round. The Celtics and Thunder — the last two NBA champs — opened things up with blowout wins over the 76ers and Suns, respectively. The third game of the day brought the biggest upset of the playoffs so far: the eighth-seeded Magic took Game 1 from the top-seeded Pistons in Detroit. The Spurs closed out the slate by pulling away from the Trail Blazers for a 13-point victory, and Victor Wembanyama had a memorable playoff debut.
Let’s start with Wemby as we break down the winners and losers of Sunday’s playoff action.
Winner: Victor Wembanyama’s playoff debut
In his first career playoff game, Wembanyama was magical. He went for 35 points (a Spurs record in a playoff debut, passing Tim Duncan’s 32 in 1998) on 13-of-21 shooting. He blocked a couple shots, and as always changed or deterred a bunch of others.
Here he puts up a road block on Toumani Camara while hardly having to move, then spikes Jerami Grant’s shot without jumping.
The dude looks like he’s playing with kids. Honest to god, making plays like this at 7-foot-4 is the peak of basketball evolution. I don’t know how it can ever get any crazier than this.
Wemby also made five of his six 3-pointers. That is the second-most 3s made in a playoff debut in league history (trailing, as you probably could’ve guessed, the great Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot and Voshon Lenard, each of whom cashed six triples in their playoff opener). Wembanyama hit a bunch of impressive 3s, but flow dribbling into a fading corner job is sick.
He also finished three alley-oop dunks, highlighting the outrageous gravity of his rim rolls. It’s the reason the Spurs led the league in corner 3-point attempts, because wing defenders are forced to sink down off of their shooters to at least marginally disrupt things like this.
It’s a total pick-you-poison situation. Even when multiple defenders collapse into the paint, all you have to do is toss the ball to the moon, and he’s the only one who can reach it.
Indeed, Wembanyama was the best player on the floor in San Antonio’s 111-98 Game 1 win. But it wasn’t the only playoff debut that went well for the Spurs, as second-year wing Stephon Castle finished with 17 points, seven rebounds and seven assists. Castle didn’t shoot it so efficiently, but he was everywhere in this game. The future is now for this Spurs team, and it is impossibly bright.
Loser: Detroit’s key role players
Cade Cunningham scored 39 points despite playing in just his fourth game since suffering a collapsed lung. He held up his end of the bargain for the Pistons. How’d everyone else do?
- Jalen Duren had eight points on four shots. He’s about to make an All-NBA team. He has to force his way into the offense more.
- Ausar Thompson played nine minutes and 33 seconds in the second half. His playing time was a point of concern in last year’s playoffs too. The Pistons don’t seem to believe they can score enough to keep him on the floor at a typical starter’s workload, and when he was playing in the first half, JB Bickerstaff didn’t trust him to guard Paolo Banchero. He’s going to be a First-Team All-Defense pick. Whether or not he gets that matchup more as the series progresses remains to be seen, but if he can’t stay on the floor, there’s nothing he can do to impact the game anyway.
- Daniss Jenkins filled in for Cunningham admirably while he was out with the collapsed lung. He shot 1-of-7 from the field in Game 1 and the Pistons lost his minutes by 11 points. If he can’t be Detroit’s secondary creator, their offense is in real trouble.
Cunningham can’t win this series singlehandedly, and even if he could, a far more difficult Cavaliers team is waiting in the next round. This was not the well-rounded group we watched all season. The Pistons need more out of the supporting cast in Game 2.
Winner: Orlando’s defense
The Magic made their all-In push for Desmond Bane on the logic that their back-to-back top-five defenses were championship ready, but their offense needed a boost. Well, one of the (many) reasons this regular season didn’t go as planned was defensive decline. A lot of that was due to injuries. Jonathan Isaac isn’t the low-minutes game-breaker he’s been the past two years, Jalen Suggs missed a lot of time early in the season, and Franz Wagner missed most of the middle of the year.
Isaac hasn’t played since March, but Wagner returned to the lineup on April 1. Not coincidentally, since he had a team-low 100.3 defensive rating thereafter, the Magic had the NBA’s top-ranked defense in April. They have since played three postseason games. In their first play-in game against Philadelphia, they allowed 96.6 points per 100 plays in the half-court, right around the top 10 in the regular season. And then they posted their fourth-best figure of the entire season (73.3) against the Hornets on Friday and their seventh-best figure of the season (81.2) on Sunday against the Pistons.
Orlando’s offense was atrocious against Philadelphia, bad against Charlotte and decent against Detroit. But the whole theory of this team was that “decent” could be good enough if the defense played this well. The Magic are peaking at the perfect time, and they’re the rare team that can actually match Detroit’s physicality. Without that advantage, the Magic have a chance to make this a pretty competitive series.
Winner: Jayson Tatum
Sunday’s Game 1 against the Sixers was the first time Jayson Tatum suited up for a playoff game since Game 4 of the second round against the New York Knicks last May, when he had to be carried off the floor after rupturing his Achilles tendon. He needed no time to reacclimate to the higher-intensity action. By the end of the first quarter, he had 10 points, seven rebounds and four assists, and had scored or assisted on more points (19) than the Sixers had as a team (18).
“Not too long ago, I wasn’t even sure if I was gonna be able to play this season, let alone get an opportunity to play in the playoffs,” Tatum said during his postgame interview on the ESPN broadcast. “Today was probably the most excited and relaxed and grateful I’ve been in my nine years of being in the playoffs. I’m just super happy to be able to be out here and play.”
Tatum finished with 25 points, 11 rebounds, seven assists and two steals on 9 of 17 shooting. Sure, it was only the first round and the Sixers were overmatched, but Tatum’s performance was a great sign for both him and the Celtics. On a personal level, it’s incredible for him to hit these heights in the playoffs less than a year after a devastating injury. And for the Celtics, his showing will give them real confidence that they can make a deep playoff run in what was supposed to be a gap year. — Jack Maloney
Loser: Sixers fans
Nothing has really gone right for the 76ers over the last decade — no other team would lose their star player to an emergency appendectomy just before the playoffs — and Sunday’s 32-point loss was just the latest bit of misery. This was the fifth time that the Sixers have lost to the Celtics by 30-plus points in the playoffs — the most such defeats by any team against a single opponent.
Yes, this was only Game 1, but it sure seems as though the Celtics are going to eliminate the Sixers from the playoffs for the fourth time in the last nine seasons. If the Sixers do end up bowing out in Round 1, that will be three seasons without a playoff series victory and their Eastern Conference finals drought will extend to 25 seasons.
The Sixers have great fans who deserve better. — Jack Maloney
Winner: Jalen Williams
If there was a question about the Thunder leading into the postseason, it was what version of Jalen Williams they were getting. Their second All-Star from a season ago played just 33 uneven games during the regular season, and Oklahoma City seemingly treated him extremely cautiously over the 82-game grind to ensure he’d be fresh and healthy in the playoffs.
Well, that effort seems to have paid off. Williams looked like his old self in a standout all-around performance (22 points on 9-of-15 shooting, seven rebounds and six assists). He was a defensive menace, creating several turnovers and then turning them into buckets in transition, where he is at his most lethal. He made multiple 3s in a game for just the sixth time this season. He even did a bit of secondary creation during Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s bench minutes, the part of his game that might be the most vital for Oklahoma City when the later rounds arrive. The Thunder haven’t been at full strength all season, but with this version of Williams, they’ll be extraordinarily hard to beat. — Sam Quinn
Loser: Phoenix’s supporting cast
Devin Booker gave the Suns 23 reasonably efficient points, considering the circumstances. Jalen Green, through athleticism and tough shotmaking, managed to at least put 17 hard-fought points on the board. The rest of Phoenix’s roster scored 44 points on 15-of-50 (30%) shooting. Yikes.
Suns skepticism this season was centered largely on playoff upside. They remade their roster in the offseason on grit and hustle, and that won them a lot of regular-season games. But nobody else on this roster has any sort of star-level upside, and most are being asked to do too much to expect the Suns to win in the playoffs. Even Booker and Green combined for just three assists because Oklahoma City’s defense is so stout that they couldn’t create advantages for their weaker teammates off of their own scoring.
There just isn’t enough shot-creation here for the role players to get much of anything going against a defense as good as the Thunder’s. Booker and Green can still get their own points, and I suppose Dillon Brooks can too if he’s going to take 22 shots, but in an 84-point team performance, the Suns had no way to actually stress Oklahoma City enough to make life easier for everyone else. — Sam Quinn
