Orlando Magic quickly becoming Jonathan Isaac’s team

The Orlando Magic may be lagging so far this season, but in Jonathan Isaac they look to have finally found their franchise cornerstone.

It would be fair to say the Orlando Magic‘s uninspired 3-7 start to the season was not what fans had in mind, especially after a summer filled with renewed confidence after they made their way back to the playoffs last season.

Unfortunately for the Magic however, everything just seems a little off right now. Center Nikola Vucevic has taken a noticeable step back from the All-Star level he performed at last season, while Aaron Gordon has failed to live up to expectations after being the team’s best player during their brief postseason exposure versus the Toronto Raptors.

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Markelle Fultz, while being one of their better players and generating a lot of excitement simply by being out on the court, is also 21 and at times looks like somebody who has appeared in less than 50 NBA games. All of which has led to some offensive play that has been as bad as some of the worst moments in their prolonged and horrible rebuild in the middle of this decade.

It is not all doom and gloom however, as among all of these concerning elements on the young season, the Magic look to have finally found a legitimate franchise player in forward Jonathan Isaac. Now in his third season, he has started the year as well as anybody else on the roster and continues to show improvements with each passing game.

Already the defense has been turned over to him and it is bringing with it hugely promising early season returns. The Magic currently rank third in defensive rating (101.1) and while Isaac does not deserve all of the credit for this, he is a large part of the reason they are strangling opponents nightly on that end.

Although they are slightly worse off when he is on the court (101.9), this is still a massive improvement on the 107.3 he posted last season and although it is a much smaller sample size, we can see through some more basic numbers that Isaac’s productivity isn’t going anywhere and only looks like it will improve.

Isaac also leads the league in blocks per game with 3.0. Isaac has swapped positions with Anthony Davis of the Los Angeles Lakers (now second at 2.9 per game) on this list regularly this season, and doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere. His 1.4 steals per game is also third among players that NBA.com classes as power forwards.

Taking players of all positions into account, Isaac ranks 26th in this category. There are those out there who don’t rate these basic numbers as highly as they were once regarded, but as well as both being clearly career highs, you only need to look at Isaac play nightly to see how doing these things consistently is helping the team.

Finding consistency was something which Isaac struggled with in his first two years in the league and with the Magic in a state of flux at the moment and trying to find the best way to utilize new guys like Fultz and Al-Farouq Aminu, the play of Isaac has been a welcome sight for the front office.

Even more so with Gordon, who it was thought could take this mantle after his aforementioned postseason play against the Raptors, clearly not looking like the player who closed out the last campaign. With the Magic clearly building their identity around defensive play, it is great for them to have Isaac in place for the future.

If he wants to be considered a true franchise player however, he needs to be able to do it on both ends.

Encouragingly for both player and team, there have also been signs of this so far early in the season. The Magic do currently rank 29th in offensive rating (99.8). Only the New York Knicks, who look like a dumpster fire at the moment, are below them (99.3), although even they are gaining on the Magic.

They improve notably when Isaac is on the floor however (106.2) and his own personal stats reflect somebody who is beginning to find his way on that end as well. The 12.1 points per game he is averaging is easily a career high, rising steadily from year two (9.6) and his rookie season (5.4).

So too is his Player Efficiency Rating, currently a really encouraging 19.2 (up on the 13 of last season and ahead of the league average of 15).

Even better is the fact Isaac is converting 37.8 percent of his 3-point attempts, while taking a career-high three per game as well. He is doing all of this with a usage rate of 16.8 percent, up only a fraction on the 16.3 of last season. This shows that Isaac is becoming much more efficient on the court with the ball in hand, a hugely positive sign.

That he is currently such a positive offensively means the Magic should look at running more plays for him and through him, as his usage incredibly ranks behind everybody on the roster except Aminu (12.3) and Khem Birch (8.3, and he is averaging 11.3 minutes per contest and has only appeared in four games so far).

It seems obvious then that Isaac should get more of a look in on this end, especially with all of the positives he has brought defensively. This brings about the big question, however, and that is whether the Magic are willing to sacrifice even more wins at what is already a critical juncture in their season in order to turn the franchise over to Isaac fully.

https://twitter.com/OrlandoMagic/status/1193669841753985027

To do so would bring with it growing pains. Isaac is only 22 and being asked to be their best two-way player demands a lot of him, especially with Fultz still learning how to run the first unit as well. It would also bring into question why exactly Vucevic was brought back on a four-year, $100 million deal during the offseason.

They were supposed to be building off of last season’s heroics and asking fans to stomach taking a step back both in win total and likely failing to reach the playoffs again is tough given what they have been through in recent years.

Then again, the potential of Isaac is beginning to look as such that it will be a small price to pay when he has taken them closer to being a legitimate playoff team.

Jonathan Isaac is progressing quickly in year three of his career, and all stats, basic or advanced, point towards somebody who is truly about to break out. So much so that he may make the Orlando Magic’s decision for them, even if it means losing some more in the short-term, in order to secure the kind of bright future that has been talked about for years.