Orlando Magic: 3 biggest disappointments from the 2018-19 NBA season

3. Offensive struggles

One of the Magic’s main goals for the season was to improve dramatically on defense. They had a coach in Clifford who excelled on this end, and players such as Aaron Gordon, Khem Birch and later Michael Carter-Williams who were capable of executing his game plan. It worked, with the Magic posting the eighth-best defensive rating in the league during the regular season (107.5).

Offensively, however, it was a different story, with the Magic finishing 22nd in the league with a rating of 108.1. This shouldn’t have been surprising though, with the team not being known for having many high level offensive weapons. Outside of Vucevic, who was fantastic and averaged a career high 20.8 points per contest, there wasn’t a lot going on.

Evan Fournier was streaky, Gordon developed into more of a two-way player and point guard D.J. Augustin was a steadying presence. Terrence Ross was great off the bench, putting up a career high with 15.1 points per game, but that wasn’t enough to make them truly dangerous on that end.

Their 3-point shooting percentages as a team didn’t help either. The Magic were the definition of average in this category, finishing 15th and converting 29.9 percent of their efforts from deep. In some ways this was a positive too, since the team had ranked in the bottom five in recent seasons.

If not for the efforts of Augustin, who shot a fantastic 42.1 percent from deep, that figure could’ve been even worse. But for an organization that improved a lot defensively and played hard each night, if they could’ve made some more shots, they could’ve added a couple of wins onto their total and possibly clinched the 6-seed.