Orlando Magic: Complete 2017 offseason grades
By Luke Duffy
The Crown Jewel
By the Magic’s standards, the signing of Jonathon Simmons was the biggest offseason signature acquired since before Dwight Howard‘s departure.
Here was a guy who played tremendous defense for the San Antonio Spurs last season, and was a key piece in their playoff run to the conference finals.
A young 27 years old, Simmons has only played 2,537 minutes in his NBA career. This covers two seasons, both of which included postseason action. There’s little wear on those tires, and the guy brings the kind of attitude you’d expect of somebody who had to pay $150 of his own money to bag a tryout with the Spurs.
He automatically becomes this team’s most promising player for the future, and likely for the present as well.
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While Vucevic has averaged a double-double in four of his last five seasons and both Isaac and Gordon could be good, it is Simmons who excites fans the most at the moment — with good reason too, as he’ll quickly become the defensive leader head coach Frank Vogel can turn to many times throughout the long regular season.
The only concern is the numbers Simmons has posted so far in his career, but we must also remember in San Antonio, no player is above the team, so they should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Nevertheless career averages of 6.1 points, 1.9 rebounds and 1.4 assists per game on 32.2 percent 3-point shooting aren’t pretty to look at. Those scoring numbers improved to just over 10 points in 20 minutes of action during last season’s playoffs, but still.
The advanced numbers don’t help his case much either, with a Player Efficiency Rating (league average is 15) during his two seasons with the Spurs sitting at a tragic 11.9, followed up with a 9.9 last year. The silver lining here is that in the playoffs those numbers jumped up to 16.7 and 15, respectively.
Still, a lot is expected of a guy who was a role player, albeit a highly effective one, through his first two years in the league.
There’s every reason to believe that he’ll deliver now that he is one of the team’s go-to guys, but that optimism just needs to be curtailed somewhat, especially during the opening months of the season.
However, signing Jonathon Simmons to a three-year, $20 million deal was a great piece of business from a team that were never going to get meetings with the established elite players. Overall, the Magic would have struggled to make a better move all summer.
Grade: A