Orlando Magic: Revisiting the decade that was the 2010s
By Luke Duffy
2016-17
When you consider how this season ultimately wound up going, it is amazing that the Magic have been able to untangle the mess they got themselves into to close out the decade at all. Frank Vogel was brought in as head coach during the summer, a move that was received well after all of the good work he had done with the Pacers.
He never got a chance to work with all of the young players in place however, as Oladipo was traded to the Oklahoma City Thunder during this time as well. At the time not everybody was upset about it, but the returns again smacked of a front office scrambling to do something to fix entirely avoidable problems.
If they had just left the young core alone, and continued to lose, who knows where they would have ended up. Instead, they got Serge Ibaka, another short-term solution, in return for Oladipo, while also shipping off the rights to Domantas Sabonis as well.
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Jennings was now gone, his temporary rental proving to be a disaster, while Ilyasova was also sent to the Thunder, proving once again that the Harris deal was a poor one. Doubling down on their efforts to go for more experience to win games, the Magic handed Jeff Green a one year, $15 million deal to play with the same desire as somebody queueing at the DMV.
It got worse, much worse, as the organization also handed out one of the worst contracts of the decade, signing center Bismack Biyombo to a four year, $72 million deal off the back of one strong performance for the Toronto Raptors in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Why they did this when Vucevic was only continuing to get better (18.2 points the previous season, before going on to average 14.6 in Biymobo’s first year in Orlando) is anybody’s guess, but it served to create a weird roster that coach Vogel found difficult to piece together. Fournier and Gordon were getting better, while Hezonja and Payton were not.
When the season was done, the Magic stood at 29-53, winning only 12 games in the eight weeks between the start of December and end of January. It most certainly wasn’t good, and not only were they back to the whiteboard on how to turn this thing around, but they were also showing it to everybody else as well.