Orlando Magic: 3 players most likely to be traded in 2018-19
By Luke Duffy
2. Evan Fournier
It is fair to wonder why Evan Fournier is even in this situation in Orlando. There are nights when he looks like their best offensive player, and he averaged a career-high 17.8 points last season, shooting a career-high 37.9 percent from 3-point range.
Defensively, the best word to describe him would be pedestrian, but there are plenty of scorers in the league today who don’t do much defending. Given the Magic’s offensive rating last season (102.8, 25th in the league), it’s not like Fournier wasn’t helping them either.
However, the feeling around the player now is that he is playing for a front office that did not trade for him or give him the extension he is now locked in to (five years, $85 million). The influx of young and versatile bigs also signifies that the way in which Orlando wants to play is changing.
This would seem to make Fournier, traditionally listed as a small forward, the odd man out. But if the Magic might be ready to move on from him, what other teams would actually want to take the $51 million he has remaining on his deal onto their books?
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It is hard to see a playoff team believing that Fournier is the missing piece to push them toward contender status, so for Orlando to get any deal over the line they would have to look to fellow rebuilding teams.
Even then Fournier is a hard sell, and so a third team might have to get involved. If you’re the Brooklyn Nets or Atlanta Hawks, Fournier only makes you a bit better in the short-term. This in turn means less losses, and a smaller chance at landing a top draft pick.
In other words, it’d be the exact process the Magic have gone through for six years, which has yet to give them a cornerstone to build around. But even the middle-of-the-road teams, such as the Charlotte Hornets or even Washington Wizards, are getting smarter about roster-building.
The Hornets could become open to cleaning deck and starting again. The Wizards signed Dwight Howard this summer, who should do all their deck clearing for them. Petty jokes aside, Orlando will be hard-pressed to find somebody who actively wants Fournier.
The moment they can do so, however, they will move on from a player who could have produced so much more, but instead left us with only fleeting moments of brilliance.