Orlando Magic: What’s the worst miss in franchise history?

The Orlando Magic have experienced some rough times throughout their history, which makes picking a worst in-game miss of all time quite hard.

If you’re an Orlando Magic fan, you have lived through some tough moments in your fandom. Most revolve around star players leaving for bigger markets or potential stars seeing their careers ruined by injury before they ever had a chance to reach their full potential.

Nestled in between these difficult times are the occasions when the franchise has been good, which for a team only in existence since 1989 is more frequent than you would think. Yes, they’ve never won a championship, making it to the NBA Finals twice is as close as they’ve gotten, but there’s been plenty to enjoy as well.

Yet even in those periods of contention, sadness and disappointment have never been too far away. Even though it is only just over a year since this happened, the Magic are more well known for shots that didn’t go in than ones that ended up going through the basket. Which begs the question. What is the worst miss in franchise history?

If you’ve been a fan since the beginning, then you’ll know that there are only two possible answers here, and depending on your age you will feel more strongly about one miss over the other. We’ll start with the outsider that is going for the unwanted crown here, and that is Courtney Lee’s missed layup in Game 2 of the 2009 NBA Finals.

For a lot of people, particularly of other fanbases, this miss often gets overlooked. This is because one look at the 2009 finals, with the Los Angeles Lakers winning the series 4-1, and many think that the matchup wasn’t a particularly close one. Including those who lived through it, with time appearing to have eroded their memory.

Really though this miss was devastating because the Magic were in Los Angeles for that game. Back then, the chance to nick a road game in the Finals had potentially huge implications. Up until 2014, the format for the Finals was 2-3-2, which would have given the Lakers homecourt advantage in a hypothetical Game 6 or Game 7.

If Lee had made that layup, the Magic would have been going back to Orlando tied 1-1 with the next three games taking place on their home court. This would have given them a chance to win it all while at home. Would this have happened though? No, that Lakers team was too good to drop three-in-a-row, no matter where they played.

But it would have made the series a lot more interesting because you can bet the Magic would have won at least one game at home (as they did anyway) which would have seen the series go at least six games (assuming the Lakers won a road game as well). What makes this even more difficult to swallow is how, watching it back, Lee seems to hang in the air perfectly to be able to lay the ball into the basket.

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He was wearing a face mask at the time which may not have helped, but given how well he did to catch the inbounds pass and position himself in such a way as to have a good chance of scoring, it becomes even more disappointing to watch the play unfold.

Yet the Magic’s history is tinged with sadness so much that this isn’t even the clear cut option for the worst miss in franchise history. That would be because Nick Anderson, a real fan favorite in Orlando, only went and had four of them in Game 1 of the 1995 NBA Finals. Again, you look at how that series finished, a 4-0 sweep by the Houston Rockets and you think it wasn’t close.

In truth, it probably wasn’t as close as 2009, as that young Magic team, spearheaded by Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway, was coming up against the most skilled offensive big man of his generation (and perhaps ever) in Hakeem Olajuwon. But how this game was thrown away hurts to even type, never mind watch back.

As explained in great detail here, the Magic had a three-point lead with less than 10 seconds remaining in Game 1. Anderson was at the free-throw line and had been a 70.4 percent free-throw shooter that year (68.3 percent in the playoffs). Statistically, he was more than likely to make one of the two free-throws required to essentially ice the game. Anderson missed both of them.

Anderson miraculously rebounded his own miss and was fouled again. Another chance to sink just one of two free-throws was graciously made available. Even Shaq himself, perhaps the most infamous poor free-throw shooter, would have statistically made two out of the four attempts as a career 52.7 percent shooter. Certainly, Anderson could’ve gotten one.

Instead, Anderson missed them both, again. The game went to overtime, with the Rockets squeezing out a 120-118 win. The Magic wouldn’t win a game the entire series, and Anderson would never be the same again. The sheer dramatics of what happened, as well as the fact that it even happened at all, make this the worst miss in Magic history.

However, with the argument that the 2009 version of the Magic would have been a step closer to a hypothetical championship if Lee’s layup went in, it’s closer than you would think. If Anderson had made even one free-throw and the Magic took a 1-0 lead, there are zero guarantees this would have resulted in winning it all.

This was a home game too, but rather than take care of business as expected, all the miss served to do was deflate their roster and fans. With Lee at least, had he scored the layup, the Magic would have been closer to a championship than ever before. Given the sheer gut punch that it was, we’ll still give this unwanted title to Anderson though.