Orlando Magic: 5 ways it has gone wrong for this team

2. Did complacency creep in?

At the start of this season, the Magic were running teams off the floor to begin games. The win over the Cavaliers was the perfect example of this. They had built a double-digit lead in the first quarter, and although they were pegged back considerably by the Cavs, they went on to close out the game.

Those hot starts allowed the team to jump out to a big lead, lose some ground when their bench was in the game, before ultimately winning anyway.

Perhaps they thought this would last for the entire season, but around about the time of the home loss to the Chicago Bulls, their lightning fast starts began to vanish. Whereas guys like Evan Fournier and Aaron Gordon were locked in right from opening tip before, it was now taking them some time to get going.

The low point came when the Utah Jazz came to town and won by 40, but the recent road loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves was almost as bad.

The team started slow yet were right in the game heading into halftime. Then a third quarter blitz stunned the Magic, who trailed by as many as 26.

Looking dead and buried the team woke up and cut the deficit down to single digits in the fourth before going on to lose the game. The urgency returned, it was just too late.

Per herosports.com the Magic have the ninth-youngest team in the league, at 25.3 years of age. They also play with the sixth-highest pace in the league at 103.1.

With the players they have they should be starting games quickly, just like how they started the season. We’ve seen already how difficult it can make the Magic to beat.