The NBA season is nearing the midway point. There are some surprises, good and bad

A year ago at this time, the Boston Celtics had a starting lineup of Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Kristaps Porzingis, Al Horford and Jrue Holiday.

The Celtics were in second place in the Eastern Conference.

Brown is still starting for Boston. Every other name in that first unit has since changed. Tatum hasn't played this season because of an Achilles injury, Porzingis is with Atlanta, Horford is with Golden State, and Holiday is with Portland.

And the Celtics are in second place in the Eastern Conference.

The NBA regular season is nearing the midway point — some teams will start hitting the 41-game mark, the halfway mark of the 82-game slate, this weekend — and surprise stories have emerged in many cases, some good, some bad. The Celtics are surely on the good side of that list.

Consider what the expectations were a few months ago: Tatum was dealing with the Achilles tear, Porzingis and Holiday were traded and Horford chose to join the Warriors. Many of the decisions the Celtics made were to get out from under a potential luxury tax bill that was going to be bigger than the gross domestic product of Micronesia. But while the perception that Boston was entering a rebuild, reset or reload year, the Celtics insisted that wasn't the reality.

At 23-12, it sure looks like they were right.

“Guys have an understanding of what they're supposed to do, and that's top to bottom,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said Monday night. “I think when you have that, you just have a better level of connectivity and then you're just able to do your job and execute what needs to be executed. ... Have an understanding of who we are as a team, have an understanding of what the game plan is, execute that regardless of who you're out there on the floor with and make sure you play hard.”

It sounds so easy.

Boston is far from the only story that could be considered a surprise to some this season. Detroit, at 27-9 and leading the East, is off to the second-best 36-game start in its history — topped only by a 31-5 mark in 2005-06. (The Pistons were also 27-9 in 2007-08.)

New York coach Mike Brown has known Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff forever; he revealed at the NBA Cup in Las Vegas last month that he actually used to babysit Bickerstaff. He gets why people may think the Pistons being 27-9 is a surprise, but he's not surprised to see Bickerstaff having success.

“It helps to have some good players, too. None of us can do this by ourselves without players and a good staff," Brown said. "But when you’re a leader in an organization like that ... over time you can see how they’ve just propelled upwards every day. A lot of credit is deserving of him and the job that he’s done in Detroit.”

The Pistons and Celtics would be ‘good’ surprises. So would Phoenix, a team that is squarely in the mix in the Western Conference despite many thinking that the loss of Kevin Durant to Houston would doom the Suns.

“We're going to go in there and play hard every day," the Suns' Jordan Goodwin said.

Milwaukee, at 16-20 largely due to injuries, is not a good surprise. Neither is the slow start for the Los Angeles Clippers, who are beginning to make up ground but still far from looking like a contender. And Atlanta, a team that was supposed to be in the hunt for East supremacy, now may be on the verge of trading away point guard Trae Young. It's an interesting situation for the Hawks; he is their franchise player (until the trade comes, anyway) but Atlanta has clearly been better this season without Young in the lineup.

So, halftime nears on this season. There's a lot for some teams to like, and a lot for other teams not to be happy about.

The good news for those teams that aren't liking where they are right now is this: There's still a long way to go. In the NBA, little is decided until the second half anyway.

Around The NBA analyzes the biggest topics in the NBA during the season.

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/nba

Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker, left, celebrates with forward Dillon Brooks after hitting the winning shot against the Oklahoma City Thunder during the second half of an NBA basketball game, Sunday, Jan. 4, 2026, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)

Boston Celtics guard Jordan Walsh, right, celebrates after scoring as Los Angeles Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard watches during the second half of an NBA basketball game Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, in Inglewood, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

Detroit Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff watches the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Utah Jazz, Friday, Dec. 26, 2025, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Tyler Tate)

Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla applauds towards his players during the first half of an NBA basketball game against the Chicago Bulls, Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Denmark and Greenland are seeking a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the Trump administration doubled down on its intention to take over the strategic Arctic island, a Danish territory.

Tensions escalated after the White House said Tuesday that the “U.S. military is always an option." President Donald Trump has argued that the U.S. needs to control the world’s largest island to ensure its own security in the face of rising threats from China and Russia in the Arctic.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned earlier this week that a U.S. takeover would amount to the end of NATO.

“The Nordics do not lightly make statements like this,” Maria Martisiute, a defense analyst at the European Policy Centre think tank, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “But it is Trump, whose very bombastic language bordering on direct threats and intimidation, is threatening the fact to another ally by saying ‘I will control or annex the territory.’”

The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Frederiksen in a statement Tuesday reaffirming that the mineral-rich island “belongs to its people.”

Their statement defended the sovereignty of Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark and part of NATO.

The U.S. military action in Venezuela last weekend has heightened fears across Europe, and Trump and his advisers in recent days have reiterated a desire to take over the island, which guards the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America.

“It’s so strategic right now,” Trump told reporters Sunday.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, have requested a meeting with Rubio in the near future, according to a statement posted Tuesday to Greenland's government website.

Previous requests for a sit-down were not successful, the statement said.

Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defense College, said an American takeover would not improve upon Washington's current security strategy.

“The United States will gain no advantage if its flag is flying in Nuuk versus the Greenlandic flag,” he told the AP. “There’s no benefits to them because they already enjoy all of the advantages they want. If there’s any specific security access that they want to improve American security, they’ll be given it as a matter of course, as a trusted ally. So this has nothing to do with improving national security for the United States.”

Denmark’s parliament approved a bill last June to allow U.S. military bases on Danish soil. It widened a previous military agreement, made in 2023 with the Biden administration, where U.S. troops had broad access to Danish airbases in the Scandinavian country.

Rasmussen, in a response to lawmakers’ questions, wrote over the summer that Denmark would be able to terminate the agreement if the U.S. tries to annex all or part of Greenland.

But in the event of a military action, the U.S. Department of Defense currently operates the remote Pituffik Space Base, in northwestern Greenland, and the troops there could be mobilized.

Crosbie said he believes the U.S. would not seek to hurt the local population or engage with Danish troops.

“They don’t need to bring any firepower. They don’t to bring anybody.” Crosbie said Wednesday. “They could just direct the military personnel currently there to drive to the center of Nuuk and just say, ‘This is America now,’ right? And that would lead to the same response as if they flew in 500 or 1,000 people.”

The danger in an American annexation, he said, lies in the “erosion of the rule of law globally and to the perception that there are any norms protecting anybody on the planet.”

He added: “The impact is changing the map. The impact I don’t think would be storming the parliament.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he spoke by phone Tuesday with Rubio, who dismissed the idea of a Venezuela-style operation in Greenland.

“In the United States, there is massive support for the country belonging to NATO – a membership that, from one day to the next, would be compromised by … any form of aggressiveness toward another member of NATO,” Barrot told France Inter radio on Wednesday.

Asked if he has a plan in case Trump does claim Greenland, Barrot said he would not engage in “fiction diplomacy.”

While most Republicans have supported Trump’s statement, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Thom Tillis, the Democratic and Republican co-chairs of the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, have criticized Trump’s rhetoric.

“When Denmark and Greenland make it clear that Greenland is not for sale, the United States must honor its treaty obligations and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark,” their statement on Tuesday said. “Any suggestion that our nation would subject a fellow NATO ally to coercion or external pressure undermines the very principles of self-determination that our Alliance exists to defend.”

Geir Moulson in Berlin and Mark Carlson in Brussels contributed to this report.

FILE - Danish military forces participate in an exercise with hundreds of troops from several European NATO members in the Arctic Ocean in Nuuk, Greenland, Sept. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)

FILE - A plane carrying Donald Trump Jr. lands in Nuuk, Greenland, Jan. 7, 2025. (Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, file)

FILE - United States Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller reacts on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein), File)

CORRECT THE ORDER OF SPEAKERS, FILE - Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, right, and Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, left, speak on April 27, 2025, in Marienborg, Denmark. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, File)