After a pretty promising start to the year, the Orlando Magic have plummeted head first into mediocrity. It hasn’t been subtle, and it most certainly hasn’t been pretty. It feels like there’s been as many blowout losses as there have been heartbreakers (Like that dumbfounding one at the hands of the Chicago Bulls the other night) and the team is stumbling from game to game.
The All-Star break will be a welcome distraction. With all the losing and negative vibes surrounding the team though, could it still actually get worse before it gets better?
In short, yes it could, and that’s a worry. So let’s look into how this could happen. For a start, while it was initially great for the Magic to moved beyond the Jacque Vaughn era, part of the reason they got into this mess, they are still yet to replace him. No rush of course, this is a team headed back to the lottery again anyway.
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Interim head coach James Borrego isn’t doing a bad job either, but we know he won’t be there for the long term. But the longer this team remains without a head coach, the longer it will take to implement the next person to take overs tactics.
This group is young and impressionable, and they need a strong leader to take them forward. We still don’t know who that will be yet, but the general feeling is that it needs to be somebody in the George Karl mold. That is, an experienced guy who knows how he wants his teams to play. So while it may not seem urgent to hire somebody else, it kind of is.
This is year three of the rebuild post Dwight Howard, and things are slowing back down to a worrying crawl once more.
For all the intriguing pieces the Magic have, and the fact a lot of experts find them intriguing and fun to talk about how good they can be, they still don’t have an identity and aren’t getting much better in the areas that count. They briefly led the league in made three pointers earlier in the campaign, and I thought that would be a quirky by product of what they were becoming.
The vision I had was two backcourt defensive terrors (Victor Oladipo and Elfrid Payton) hovering around one of the best big men in the league (Nikola Vucevic) while getting some production from the wings (Tobias Harris) and off the bench (Channing Frye).
While that’s exciting to think about in theory, it just hasn’t worked. Which brings us on to our next point, and something that would certainly set this team back even more. Harris is a restricted free agent this summer, and you could make a case for him being the most improved player in the league this year.
Since day one of preseason, he’s taken on more of an offensive burden with his scoring output (His 17.4 points a game is easily a career high) while shooting 37 percent from downtown (room for improvement there, but his previous best was a horrific 26 percent, and that was his rookie year in Milwaukee with the Bucks).
He’s integral to the team going forward, and in theory there should be no reason to panic as the team can match any offer that comes their way. There will absolutely be offers by some more established teams with cash lying around because of the upcoming influx of money because of the new television deal the league made.
So not only with it be hard to match the offer for Harris, especially with Oladipo coming off his rookie contract sooner rather than later and trying to sign some more veterans.
But what if Harris doesn’t want to stay? Again, he can be kept by the team, even if he doesn’t want to be. But holding him against his will would surely create a poisonous atmosphere in the dressing room, one something all organizations fear will infiltrate and destroy a young core (Just ask the Washington Wizards).
It’s a thorny issue, and it could all potentially stem from the shambles this season is fast becoming. Other stats that stick out and point towards things not improving any time quick are +/- differential (The Magic are a bottom five team with a minus-6.0 rating), free throw percentage (73.4 percent, 27th in the league) and rebounding (40.9, 27th in the league).
The rebounding figures are annoying and show a clear lack of effort.
Vucevic averages 11.2 a game, so without him they’s surely be last in the NBA. Oladipo is athletic, as is Harris, while Payton is long for his position. All of this points towards a team who should be competing hard on the glas every night (We didn’t even mention Aaron Gordon), but it just isn’t happening.
It’s all leading to one anti-climatic season. This was supposed to be the year real progress was made. Not necessarily even a playoff berth, but a clear step in the right direction. That did happen to start the year, but then this team got lost somewhere along the way. Really lost. For the points outlined above, I actually think it”s going to get worse before it gets better as well.
It’s frustrating, because there was a gap in the Eastern Conference there for another team to rise up and join the playoff mix.
Despite the fact the West is clearly better, there are also between more than 10 teams in the East better than Orlando right now. It wasn’t meant to be this way, I’m still not entirely sure how we got here. But this all feels like the team took a couple of steps back in recent weeks, back to those dark days after Howard was gone.
The bright future is still there, it’s just getting harder to see through all the negativity right now. I don’t know when this will change. It worries me.
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