Orlando Magic: Who Is Weighing The Team Down
By Luke Duffy
For a rebuilding team like the Orlando Magic, the season so far has been a tough one already. It seems like there are more good teams in the league then there ever have been, with even the likes of the often maligned Sacramento Kings looking as good as they have in years.
What this means are that there are fewer easy games on the schedule, unless you’re playing the Philadelphia 76ers or Los Angeles Lakers. But what can be just as harmful for a growing team is when some of the players in the roster are having to be carried along by the better players on this team.
Every squad is probably guilty of this, and we’re only a couple of weeks into the new season, but let’s name and shame those who could be doing more in the hope they read every online article posted about them in an effort to motivate themselves.
I had originally wanted to start out here by calling out shooting guard Evan Fournier for not doing enough since his arrival from the Denver Nuggets that sent Arron Afflalo in the other direction.
It just seemed to me that so far this season the guy had kind of floated through games aimlessly, never threatening to take over and allowing the action to come to him. I knew he was scoring buckets for the team, he has a nice offensive game that only stands to get better.
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Then I took a closer look at the numbers, and realized the guy is scoring 16 points of game on 50 percent shooting from the field. For a team sorely lacking much going forward, this is pretty big, and it immediately made me re-evaluate how I see the guy.
Heck, he even led the team in scoring in the team’s second win of the season, a road W against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
With Nikola Vucevic and Tobias Harris doing a lot of the heavy lifting, combined with Elfrid Payton seeing a lot of the ball and the fact Fournier is new to this franchise, it makes sense that he would quietly pick his spots and go about his business.
He’s averaging less than three rebounds or assists so far this year, but he’s mostly just there for the scoring anyway so that’s alright. The point is, Fournier is doing just fine here, even if it doesn’t always appear that way. The only knock I’d have is that he’s taking 11.3 shots a game.
We know he can score, so I’d like to see him get the ball a little bit more, because it is sure to translate into more points. So Fournier isn’t weighing the team down at all, but perhaps he could do a little more to help mask some of the faults of the other stragglers tagging along on the bench.
Which brings me to Ben Gordon. Bringing him onboard on a two-year, $9 million (second year non-guaranteed) contract was a low risk move by all accounts. But it’s also been a low reward move, in that Gordon is doing precious little.
He’s scoring 7.9 points a game, is pretty much a non-factor on the defensive end, and just generally isn’t playing very well, not that I’m surprised.
Next we have Aaron Gordon who is playing like, well, a rookie. That’s acceptable of course, because he is one. But flashy as he can be, he’s still struggling with the fundamentals and getting lost on defensive sets. Oh, and Mason Plumlee put him on a poster as well.
So while Gordon is weighing the team down to an extended, it’s to be expected, and so ultimately isn’t his fault. At least not yet anyway, but any sort of improvement from him would be a welcome boost.
It’s kind of puzzling to see forward Andrew Nicholson and guard Devyn Marble pretty much falling out of the rotation altogether as well. Not because they’re great players or anything, just they do have particular skill sets, and Orlando isn’t very good, so why not try and utilize them?
In this way they are weighing the team down in a different way again, in that head coach Jacque Vaughn doesn’t think they can help very much. Nicholson was in the rotation last year and is just that, a rotation player. Still he brings a good energy.
Marble’s exclusion is probably easier to understand, in that the rookie is a defensive specialist, and this is a team that needs all the offensive firepower on the court that it can get.
Flipping the script for just a moment, I kind of wish Channing Frye didn’t play for this team. Don’t get me wrong, love his game and love how he stretches the floor for this team. But the guy is getting no younger and could do a great job for a contending team.
I don’t know the guy personally, but he seems genuinely nice as well, and just somebody you’d want to root for. He absolutely is not weighing this team down, it’s the other way around. We might return to the subject of the Magic letting him free another time.
So there you have it, a long enough list of who could be doing more for this Eastern Conference cellar dweller. We didn’t even touch on the relatively average play of Kyle O’Quinn and Payton’s inability thus far to shoot, but we can’t rag on everybody.
Thankfully this team possesses real talent in Nikola Vucevic and Tobias Harris, as well as the soon to return Victor Oladipo. It’s going to be a long season as it is, and some of these under performing players aren’t making it any easier.