Orlando Magic: Mario Hezonja is continuing to make them pay

The Orlando Magic have made various personnel errors in the past couple of years. Mario Hezonja looks to be next on that unfortunate list.

While the Orlando Magic aimlessly float toward the end of the regular season, another depressing subplot has emerged.

That is the continued improved play of forward Mario Hezonja. The problem here is the fact that he is an unrestricted free agent this summer.

Given that he wasn’t afforded the same opportunities to impress as Elfrid Payton or Victor Oladipo during his first three years in Orlando, it is hard to imagine Hezonja sticking around.

Just like the trade that sent Payton to the Phoenix Suns at the trade deadline, though, it seemed like the right move at the time, but the decision to decline his team option now looks to be backfiring. He might even be coming off his best month yet as a professional, and he is using his extended run to put himself in the shop window.

But has Hezonja been so good that the team will miss him when he’s gone? Has he shown the kind of improvement that would be beneficial to this team next season if he were to somehow re-sign?

In the month of February, Hezonja averaged 15.5 points per game on 40.4 percent shooting from the 3-point line. That was the highest monthly scoring output of Hezonja’s career so far. His second highest? January 2018, when he averaged 10.8 points per game.

Clearly then, he’s getting more comfortable offensively, but in truth, Hezonja has always had the tools to be a solid scorer; he just wasn’t given the minutes to do so and his confidence took a massive hit as a result. Injuries have given him an opportunity this year, which he has taken with both hands.

His 3-point shooting in February may only have been the second-highest mark of the season for him, but his top display (62.5 percent) came in October. There were only seven games in that month, the Magic won five of them (amazing to think now) and Hezonja only attempted eight shots from long range.

So really, February was his best month so far. Even more encouraging was the fact it was higher than his average for the season so far (35.9 percent) and came while he logged big minutes.

This is where we can begin to see the real impact Hezonja is having on the team, and it is something that will be missed should he leave. Hezonja is becoming much more efficient, something that wasn’t even the case up until Christmas time.

The numbers he put up in February were while playing 27.5 minutes a night. His career average to date was 17.4 minutes per game.

Hezonja’s effective field goal percentage has shot up this season to 54 percent — easily a career high and miles better than the 42 percent he posted last season.

As mentioned, his scoring and 3-point shooting have improved as well, and this is reflected by the 106.2 offensive rating the Magic have when he’s on the court.

That’s the best output Hezonja has ever managed (last season the team was a horrific 94.7 when he was playing) and is better than the 104.7 rating the team has managed for the season as a whole.

Orlando Magic

The best part about all of this though? Hezonja’s usage rate while on the court has gone from 18.8 percent last season to 19.8 percent this year.

That’s a tiny increase for such big returns in some key offensive areas. Unlike before, when Hezonja was taking ill-advised shots and forcing passes, he’s playing within the flow of the offense now.

This can be seen in his Player Efficiency Rating (league average 15) of 14.5 too, and he posted an impossibly bad 7.2 in this category last season.

How fantastic would it be for the Magic to know that they could’ve had a more efficient Hezonja coming off the bench for the foreseeable future on a tiny contract?

This is what it could have been, and it’s perhaps the worst part about all of this. There was no interest in the player to start this season, not even from the organization he played for.

The Magic could have kept him on a cheap, $5.2 million team option, but had no interest in him and couldn’t even find a trade partner for him. That was how disappointing he had been so far and how little value he had around the league.

Again it’s hard to blame the organization for looking to move on since he was a player drafted by the last front office. Fans weren’t anticipating him being signed to any sort of long-term deal down the road either, and moving him at the deadline for anything at all would have been welcomed.

However, the decision to decline his team option looks borderline irresponsible now. It’s just typical that another Magic player would begin to shows signs of growth once the end of his time with the team arrived, only this time it’s not even after he has left the team, but rather when he only has one foot out the door.

In some ways, that’s even worse than seeing Oladipo and Tobias Harris excel in different uniforms. Hezonja is doing it in the pinstriped blue, and he has final say on where he plays next season.

For now though, he is enjoying his chance to play big minutes on a team that is trying to tank its way to the bottom.

He may need some work defensively (he has a career-worst 112.8 defensive rating for the team when he’s on the court) but he’s not the only one in Orlando.

In year three, he was making the kind of strides that one might expect, and really doing so at such an efficient pace, he could have evolved into a wonderful sixth man candidate for this team.

Maybe he still will, although it is hard to see why he would want to continue playing for a team that stagnated his career before it even had a chance to get going.

Next: 2017-18 Week 20 NBA Power Rankings

Mario Hezonja continues to take his chance, and we know now that he definitely has a place on this rebuilding team. Everyone just realized it too late.