Welcome to our favorite time of the year: panic season!

Usually, it takes about a dozen games to have fairly reliable (as in, at least somewhat predictive) data about where a team stands and where it’s heading. Most of the NBA has played 12 games as of Wednesday night.

As a result, once we get to this point in mid-November, it’s much harder for teams to write off poor performance as a result of small samples. Keeping with that theme, we had our first firing of the new season Tuesday, with the Panic! At the American Airlines Center resulting in Dallas axing general manager Nico Harrison 11 games into the Mavericks’ campaign.

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Panic season offers some particularly compelling theater this season because of several situations developing across the always-competitive Western Conference. Notably, we have another major panic situation developing in Los Angeles with the news that Bradley Beal will miss the season because of a hip fracture. The Clippers are only 3-8 as it is. Meanwhile, the Golden State Warriors lost six straight road games, the Memphis Grizzlies have half a roster and a half-trying Ja Morant, the New Orleans Pelicans are terrible and gave away their draft pick and the Sacramento Kings are … the Sacramento Kings.

While the East isn’t drama-free either (greetings, Orlando!), the size and scale of their panic situations pale in comparison to those we’re seeing in the West right now. Seven teams in particular began this season with at least some hope of playoff contention, if not outright title contention in a few cases, and have seen their early-season performance fall well short of that mark. I covered the Mavericks after Harrison’s firing; today, it’s time for the others.

Let’s walk through them case by case, with the help of a special advanced analytics tool I’ve called the “Panic Alarm Meter” that rates each team on a 1-5 scale.

Timberwolves: 🚨

I was pretty worried about Minnesota based on how it looked coming out of the gate, and I’m not completely at ease just yet.