How Devyn Marble Can Positively Impact The Orlando Magic
By Luke Duffy
To begin this season, rookie Devyn Marble was little more than an afterthought for this young Magic team. Despite the fact there were minutes up for grab in the rotation, Marble made little impact, and fell out of contention early. To be fair to him, he wasn’t exactly given a ton of chances to shine either.
The 56th pick from last year’s draft wasn’t a totally unknown quantity, it was just hard to see how his talents fit in with this team. To start this calendar year though, that question may have been solved.
Marble is known as a defense-first player, and one who doesn’t offer much offensively. As a shooting guard/small forward (Who also has seen some time in smaller line-ups as a power forward) he was always going to struggle behind the likes of Tobias Harris, Ben Gordon and Channing Frye to get any sort of serious minutes on the court.
His case wasn’t helped when you take into account his little impact on the defensive end.
But in the Magic’s recent loss to the Brooklyn Nets, we got a small sample size of what he can do for this team. It’s exciting because there’s a high probability that he gives the team an extra dimension on the court as a result.
Marble spent some time down in the D-League with the Erie Bayhawks, and playing substantial minutes in a couple of games down there seems to have worked wonders for his confidence.
Marble returned to the Magic and featured against the Nets, and was part of the line-up that stemmed the tide and came agonizingly close to turning the game around. Even better, he held seven time All-Star Joe Johnson to four points while being tasked with guarding him, and he looked pretty impressive in doing so.
It wasn’t a flawless performance, but it was great from a young guy still trying to get a foothold in this league against a guy who can get hot in a hurry and damage opponents with his various ways of scoring.
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Marble’s length is a key reason for this, at 6’6″ he might be a little undersized to play the 4, but his long limbs means he can still have an impact while playing there. As a shooting guard or small forward though, he has the potential to become a real lockdown threat. That potential was always there, I spoke about it here before, and to see a little bit of it in action was great.
Allowing ourselves to think ahead for a moment, in the future Marble could form what could be a rock solid core. In Elfrid Payton and Victor Oladipo, the Magic have a backcourt consisting of two players who will one day probably defend at an elite level. As it is, Oladipo plays like that on some nights anyway and always gives maximum effort.
If they’re in a situation similar to the game against Brooklyn and need to get some stops, introducing Marble makes a ton of sense. Those three on the court could approach Chicago Bulls/Indiana Pacers types of defensive numbers, which would be huge as this franchise gears for a playoff push.
Offensively the team would probably stagnate a little, both Marble and Payton aren’t much threat yet on the end, but regardless it adds another layer, another dimension to this team. While Marble wouldn’t help much with regards to this team being a bottom five rebounding outfit in the league, he’s undoubtedly an energy guy who can come in and get stops.
Every team needs players like this if they want to be successful, and you feel coming off the bench and getting stops will be Marble’s calling card for as long as he’s in the league.
We could talk about how excitable it would be if he could develop even one go to offensive move, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. Right now we should be celebrating the character he has shown from being out of the rotation, to down in the D-League, to back and contributing.
From playing five minutes for the team all season total over their first 33 games to seeing his minutes quadruple as he guarded an All-Star, it’s been a good week for the guy. He’s given this team an unexpected weapon at this point in the season, and one it could desperately use given the relatively poor run of form the team has been on recently.
It will be interesting to see how Marble is used in Orlando’s next game against the the Denver Nuggets. We’ve glossed over it here, but he only saw just under seven minutes of action against the Charlotte Hornets in a loss at home the other night. It’s somewhat frustrating as well, because perhaps Marble could have marked Kemba Walker out of the game given the chance.
The shorthanded Hornets don’t have a ton of weapons with which to harm opponents right now, so putting Marble on Walker would have be interesting to see if it made a difference.
The hope is that he doesn’t fade into obscurity again, buried at the back of the bench as this team continues to lose games. He can certainly have an impact on the floor, we’ve seen it in the one true chance he’s been given. Let’s hope he gets some more, this team needs all the help it can get from unexpected sources right now.