Orlando Magic: Is Bismack Biyombo taking his chance?

Injuries have given center Bismack Biyombo a clear path to the starting five for the Orlando Magic, but is he taking his chance?

For the Orlando Magic, their season continues to go from bad to worse, with a return to the NBA Draft Lottery this coming summer looking like a near certainty. It hasn’t all been bad, but as of now it is difficult to see how exactly the team can improve in the short-term.

Their situation took another blow back on Dec. 23 when center Nikola Vucevic fractured a bone in his hand, keeping him out of action for two months.

Depending on who you ask, this could be viewed as a positive though, since many fans are ready to move on from the Vucevic era in Orlando.

Although injury has hurt his trade value (he may not be back on the court until after the February deadline), there was cautious optimism that fellow center Bismack Biyombo could excel in his absence.

Biyombo signed for a four-year, $72 million deal in the summer of 2016, and so far the former Toronto Raptors and Charlotte Hornets player has failed to stand out. The fact he’s the joint highest earner on this team right now (making $17 million this season) increases expectations too.

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Now that Vucevic is out for the foreseeable future, however, how has Biyombo fared so far as the unequivocal leading big man for this team?

Biyombo has started the last five games for the Magic, and despite seeing a bump in minutes (28.5 per game), his production hasn’t accurately reflected all that he has done on the court.

Stat lines like four points and six rebounds in 18 minutes in their most recent loss to the Houston Rockets are the kind of numbers we’ve come to expect from him.

Yet there is no doubting he works hard for this team when on the court, and though intangibles like that turn many people off, Biyombo is still doing what he is best at.

He is averaging only 5.3 rebounds per game for the season so far, his lowest output in four seasons and the second-lowest mark of his career, but that number is largely due to the fact Biyombo was coming off the bench before the Vucevic injury and that he’s averaging the second-fewest minutes of his career at 17 per game.

Since assuming the starting role, however, Biyombo has posted 12, 12, 10, 17 and six rebounds, a dramatic improvement (11 per game).

In fact, his 13-point, 17-rebound effort in a loss to the Brooklyn Nets was the most Biyombo has looked like that fearsome postseason player we saw with the Raptors since joining Orlando.

Unfortunately for him, these improved stats are not equating to wins, with the Magic going 1-4 since Biyombo stepped up.

Where it gets worse for Biyombo is the fact his Player Efficiency Rating (PER, league average 15) of 11.9 is his lowest mark since his second season in the league. Although PER isn’t a foolproof way to decipher how a player is impacting a team, Biymobo’s Player Impact Estimate (PIE) of 8.6 is the third-lowest output of his career too.

For some context his PIE was 10.5 during that one, at times excellent, season with the Raptors, and that number only takes into account his less dominant regular season in Toronto.

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Although the sample size as a starter is small (Biyombo hadn’t started a game all year before the Vucevic injury), his supposed rim protection hasn’t translated over to the team’s overall defense. At least not yet.

The Magic had a league-average defense through the first seven or so weeks of the season, before injuries and lack of focus caused it to collapse completely.

When Biyombo became a starter, the Magic ranked 24th in that category in the league. Now they are 26th, with a rating of 108.

This also goes a long way to explaining why the Magic have the third-worst record in the entire league.

Biyombo alone was never going to fix that when he became a starter; he’s not the kind of player who can plug that many holes with his talent. But he is a defensive specialist and at times excellent rim protector, so to see their rating slip even further in such a short space of time is alarming.

Again, we can’t doubt Biyombo’s commitment on the court. He sets rock-solid screens for guards and wrestles with everybody in the paint for the ball.

But the Magic currently have the worst rebounding percentage (47.3 percent) in the entire NBA. Whether Biyombo was coming off the bench or starting, that is not good enough.

You could argue this isn’t exclusively on his shoulders, and is not. But the team is paying $17 million for a guy who can’t shoot and averages 60 percent at the free throw line.

So expecting him to impact overall rebounding numbers and defensive rating is not too much to ask.

As teams continue to go smaller and the Magic stick with a more traditional big like Biyombo, it should in theory be easier for him to improve the team’s rebounding numbers.

The Magic have even experimented with their lineup in the short time Vucevic has been out, relegating Biyombo back to the bench and having Aaron Gordon play as a small-ball 5.

All of which is to say that Bismack Biyombo now has the chance to have his most consistent run with the Orlando Magic and to make the position his own. Only the early returns haven’t been promising and there is still plenty of room for improvement.