A year ago, Orlando’s vision of a jumbo-sized, über-versatile roster built around Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner seemed to epitomize where basketball was heading. Now, the team is trudging through a snakebitten season that has tested the viability of its blueprint.
Back in January, the Detroit Pistons had a chance to compete against an opponent scarcely seen on an NBA court this season: the healthy Orlando Magic. Remember them? Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner, and Jalen Suggs hadn’t played a single game together since late October, alternating injuries in what has been a snakebitten season in Central Florida. So snakebitten, it turns out, that Suggs couldn’t even make it through Orlando’s grand reunion without picking up a new leg injury that forced him to exit the game early.
Fortunately for the Magic, they still had Banchero and Wagner in uniform. Paolo delivered body blows throughout the first three quarters, and Franz came through with a haymaker in the fourth, sealing up a much-needed win. “This is what your best players do,” Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley told reporters after the game. After spending most of the season watching one another from the sidelines, the two costarring forwards finished with an identical 32 points and seven assists apiece, setting each other up, again and again, for easy scores.
If only it were always that easy. Every game Banchero and Wagner play together is an education—and this season has brought some hard lessons. Orlando’s offense has floundered even with both back in the lineup, as action after action has devolved into a crowded mess. No lead feels safe. The Magic, who at one point ranked third in the East, have crashed all the way to eighth. If last season announced them as a serious playoff team, this season has been a reminder of how far they have to go.
“We’re still in a discovery process,” Magic president of basketball operations Jeff Weltman told The Ringer earlier this season. “I don’t think we’re a fully baked team yet, by a long shot.”
Injuries, while unfortunate, lend themselves to that sort of discovery. When Banchero tore his oblique back in October, the responsibility to drive Orlando’s offense fell to Wagner. He thrived under the weight of it, creating at a scale he never had before—and the Magic came that much closer to understanding what the German-born forward is capable of. And when Wagner tore his own oblique in December, in stepped rookie Tristan da Silva. It was never the plan for da Silva, who started the season out of the rotation, to be the Magic’s first option on offense for weeks at a time. But if you want to make the basketball gods laugh, show them your intended depth chart.
As the makeshift Magic trudged through the extended absences of Banchero and Wagner, they also lost Franz’s brother, Mo Wagner, for the season with a torn ACL and weathered injuries to every other center on the roster. At one point, roughly half the team was sidelined. It’s been a long time since the Magic didn’t have to simply make do, and now they’ll be without Suggs for the indefinite future. The point guard, who will soon undergo arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, told the Orlando press corps on Saturday that he still hopes to return in the playoffs. Within that, though, are actually two hopes: that his recovery can progress more smoothly after surgery and that the wayward Magic can survive long enough for him to make it back to the court.
“Before this season becomes a memory, I want us to leave our imprint on the year ’24-25,” Suggs says. “And I think we can make a pretty good one.”
At full strength, the Magic are dangerous, unconventional, and dangerously unconventional—organized around two creators who tower at 6-foot-10. “I think what we have is really unique with me and Franz,” Banchero says. “You can’t really find a forward duo like that, offensively or defensively, with our ability to switch and guard 1 through 5, with our ability to handle the ball, shoot the 3, get to the lane, draw fouls. I think it’s hard for a lot of teams to deal with.”
All the clutter in Orlando’s offense has obscured those qualities lately. But squint a bit, and you just might see the future. The Magic may not be able to break the underlying math of the 3-point-boom NBA, but they cover with such speed and force that they’ll make damn sure you can’t, either. Even stout wings have a hard time sticking with Franz off the dribble or contesting Paolo’s pull-up jumper, and smaller ones have no shot whatsoever. Orlando seems like it could represent an evolutionary step forward, if only it could get out of its own way.
There is more in play than just Paolo and Franz. Possessions have gone through Suggs or Anthony Black as they work over the top of smaller guards, through lanky forwards like da Silva or Jonathan Isaac as they put their ball skills to use, or even through bruisers like Goga Bitadze and Wendell Carter Jr. in the handoff game. “Every person becomes the quarterback when the ball touches their hands,” Mosley says. Every other Magic player, then, has to orient and route themselves accordingly.
“Having guys who can all handle the ball and initiate and make plays—I think it does cause some confusion early,” Banchero says. “But if you have the right mix and the right chemistry, I think it also can cause a lot of confusion for the opponent.”
That sort of positionless premise isn’t new, but its dimensions are. Most teams cause confusion by playing smaller to get as much shooting on the floor as possible. But the Magic use size to create mismatches and use those mismatches to create leverage. The premise tracks, so long as they’re able to capitalize. Scoring can get cumbersome for a young team with so little shooting, especially when the Magic haven’t had a consistent enough rotation to work out the kinks.
Paolo, after all, has barely played with a fully emboldened Franz, and this version of Franz has barely played with a complete roster around him. As a duo, they’ve hardly shared the court with Suggs; the Magic’s three most important players have appeared in just six games together this season, logging a grand total of 97 minutes. There’s still so much left to discover in how it all blends and so much riding on whether it truly can. If Orlando can manage even a passable offense, it might be able to advance beyond the first round of the playoffs for the first time in 15 years. Or maybe, with the roster finally more or less intact, the up-and-coming Magic will learn exactly what they’re still missing—and what it might cost to obtain. There’s no real way to chart a course for a roster like this one. You just put the ball in play, with all of the versatility Orlando has at its disposal, and let the team show you where it’s going.
Banchero didn’t become a forceful player so much as he was born one. His mother, Rhonda, was a self-described “banger” at the University of Washington, where she power-posted her way into the Husky Hall of Fame. It was her husband, Mario, who insisted that a young Paolo learn how to handle the ball like a guard—though Rhonda wouldn’t let her son dribble around a problem he could barge right through. “My mother was a very, very physical player,” Banchero says, “and she always made sure I was using my body, using my voice, and just being a presence.”
That homegrown physicality was nurtured on the gridiron, where Banchero made hay as a giant dual-threat quarterback. “It was kind of hard to stop a 40-inch-long stiff arm,” one of his former teammates, Owen Prentice, told 247 Sports. “He was always running around stiff arming kids and then throwing bombs.” Growth spurts took Banchero out of the scramble game, and then out of football altogether. Instead, he battled with older kids on the hardwood in the AAU circuit, and against pros in Jamal Crawford’s legendary pickup runs. In a single season under Coach K at Duke, Banchero learned how a single bump or a well-timed seal could change the course of an entire possession. By the time Paolo made his NBA debut, he was already a walking mismatch—overwhelming even to players a decade his senior. Magic guard Cory Joseph, then a reserve for the Pistons, was there to experience it firsthand. And really, to experience one play in particular.
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re getting to, brother,” Joseph says, shaking his head, when I bring up that game. I was getting to this:
“You wonder if I have any memories?” Joseph says. “I do got a memory—I have a nightmare. I’ve got a fuckin’ nightmare when I go to sleep! I see this guy’s knee in my flipping chest!”
What was a direct hit for Joseph—one he says he can still feel—was only a glancing blow for Banchero, who powered right through for an and-1 dunk. “Something that I realized right away when I came into the league was that I can get to the free throw line a lot,” Banchero says. In the past 25 years, only one rookie (Blake Griffin) has attempted more free throws than Banchero did his first season. This era of Magic basketball began in 2021, when the team traded mainstays Nikola Vucevic and Aaron Gordon at the deadline—bringing back, among other things, the draft pick that would become Franz Wagner. But Orlando didn’t begin to take on its current, bludgeoning form until it drafted Banchero the following year, stacking size upon size.
During Paolo’s rookie season, the Magic often started four players standing 6-foot-10 or taller. Yet for all that height, it took Orlando time to find its backbone. “We were just going into games expecting to lose,” Banchero remembers. And perhaps worse than that: Magic opponents came to Orlando expecting to win easily. It became part of the Magic’s mission to disabuse teams of that notion. Those other clubs might have had more experience, more firepower, and even more talent. But against Orlando, they would have to fight for everything. No pass would go unchallenged. No dribble uncontested. Pulling down a rebound would mean grappling with one of the biggest lineups in basketball, and even attempting to score inside would mean taking hits.
The Magic turned that force into a way of life—and in the fall of 2023, they put it in writing. As a clarifying exercise during training camp, Mosley brought his team together in the film room and let them set their own priorities. They would play with grit. They would be accountable to each other. They would stay connected. The Magic hashed out an identity, together, and put it into a contract for every player to sign. “And from that point on,” Suggs says, “nobody let anybody slip.” Orlando went on to have a breakout season—which, beyond the impressive win total (47, the highest for any Magic team since 2011) and a narrow seven-game loss to the Cavs in the first round—was a declaration. The perception of the team changed once there were bruises to show for it.
“It’s just not a good feeling when someone’s out there beating up on you,” says Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who came to Orlando as a free agent back in July. His previous team, the Nuggets, lost both of their games against the Magic last season in battles of attrition. “You can actually feel that,” he says, “emotionally and physically.”
Trying to score against Orlando takes a particular toll. The Magic have turned themselves into one of the league’s most oppressive defenses, allowing fewer points per possession this season than all but the Thunder. Yet in the fourth quarter, no other team compares. The more you try to score against the Magic, the harder it gets. Most defenses worth their salt can contain an opponent’s first and second actions. Elite defenses might even keep the third under wraps. The Magic, however, are big enough and versatile enough to keep defending. The initial break fizzles out, a step-up screen goes nowhere, the curling shooters never quite get open—and now, all of a sudden, the only option left is a desperate, rushed iso against a 6-foot-10 athlete who can really move.
Among Orlando’s rotation regulars, there are no weak links. There’s too much positional size, too much activity, and beyond that, a clear organizational currency in giving a shit. The Magic have a pair of all-world defenders (Suggs and Isaac) and so many roadblocks and irritants besides. Even the stars do more than hold their own. Wagner is tenacious on the ball and shuffles his feet remarkably well for a player of his stature. Banchero isn’t quite as consistent, but he’s nimble enough to erase many of his mistakes on the fly. Both can be ridiculous in rotation, particularly when the Magic are in a full-on scramble.
“I wouldn’t even say we have crazy coverages,” Wagner adds. “I think it’s pretty simple. We just try to do the same stuff every time, and when you do it enough, you become pretty good and you create habits that carry over.” It’s a tale as old as Hubie Brown. But when a team can master simple coverages with a lineup full of huge, multi-positional players, the simple becomes revolutionary. “I think for us,” Banchero says, “really any lineup you put out there—whether it’s the starting group, the bench group, you mix up the groups—I think we’re always gonna have size. We’re always gonna have defensive versatility. We’re always gonna have guys that are physical and delivering blows.” Orlando is always, in other words, going to wear opponents down.
That’s how a Magic team missing five rotation players put the clamps on one of the most potent offenses in the league. It’s why Orlando has lockdown lineups with any of Carter, Bitadze, Mo Wagner, Isaac, or Banchero at the 5. It’s what gave Suggs—a first-class menace—the freedom to hunt and pressure to his heart’s content, supported by multiple massive help defenders at all times. There’s no one true anchor to Orlando’s coverage. There’s just the contract: a mutual agreement by the Magic to dedicate themselves in ways that other teams don’t. To dig every possible possession out of the trenches.
“We talk about it before every game,” Black says. “Let’s be who we are. Let’s take our identity and put everything into it.” With enough belief, a piece of paper can become the means of survival. But playing a committed, physical style takes its toll. Doing it shorthanded for months on end takes an even bigger one, especially when every attempt to score feels so arduous. There’s more to basketball than just surviving.
This season has taught Franz Wagner what it really means to be a star. You think you know, but you don’t. You can’t. Not until you have the ball in your hands with all eyes on you, night after night, with no room for error. Wagner didn’t grow up running teams of his own in Germany, and it wasn’t until his teenage years with Alba Berlin that he had a chance to create out of the pick-and-roll with any real consistency. The basic reads came to him quite naturally. “At the end of the day, pick-and-roll is just putting two on the basketball, and then you read and react from there,” Wagner says. “I think that’s why even players who don’t necessarily do that exact motion, if you know how to play, you’re probably gonna be able to figure that stuff out.”
For most of his basketball life, Wagner has been more of a connector than a creator. He never really advanced beyond the level of a secondary option during his two years at Michigan—attacking off the catch from the weak side, mostly just to help keep the Wolverines in motion. In his sophomore season, he finished third on his own team in both points and assists and built a draft profile based on his unassuming floor game. Part of Wagner’s appeal as a prospect was the idea that you wouldn’t have to call plays to set him up. The ball would find him because he knew where to be, and he would swing it to set up a teammate because he understood, implicitly, where a possession needed to go.
During his first three seasons with the Magic, Wagner gently pushed on the edges of that approach—at first handling the ball when lead guards were injured, then building out his pick-and-roll game opportunistically, and eventually making himself a critical part of Orlando’s playmaking mix. Like most things with Franz, the process was patient and measured—at least it was until Banchero tore his oblique barely a week into this season, and the time for patient and measured disappeared.
Wagner’s usage exploded overnight. He initiated more, created more, shot more—and no one was more acutely aware of that fact than Franz. “It’s obviously a new situation for me,” Wagner says. “But just trying to score that much, being that aggressive—it also comes with not always taking a great shot and being OK with that.” Even as he explains this, Wagner seems almost embarrassed by it. The biggest learning curve for Franz this season didn’t come from the particulars of running an offense or the scrutiny from being the headliner on the scouting report. It was learning to quiet the part of his brain that set off alarms whenever he took a tough, off-balance shot. It was understanding that part of his job, without Paolo in the lineup, was to press in ways that his other teammates couldn’t. Settling, it turns out, is a skill—and it demands a particular kind of confidence.
“As the best player or one of the best players, sometimes the call is for you to force the issue,” Banchero says. “I think Franz has always been in control of his game and who he is, so he hasn’t always been used to having to do that. I feel like I have no problem doing that; sometimes that’s a blessing and a curse. But I think he’s seeing that when he’s the main guy out there, you’ve gotta take the between-the-legs stepback and knock it down at the buzzer sometimes. It comes with being a star.”
In the stretch of games between Banchero’s injury and his own, Wagner averaged 26 points, six rebounds, and six assists—personal bests that had him in early contention for Most Improved Player. His extended absence disqualified him from the awards race, but Wagner’s development is one of the biggest stories of the season all the same. If Orlando ever cracks the code of its offense—with Wagner and Banchero operating at a high level together—the league could be in trouble. This roster is built to bully modern, perimeter-oriented teams and to hamstring the flexibility they depend on. Paolo and Franz are mismatch killers. They don’t let teams switch. They don’t give them time to cross-match. They strangle the creativity of their opponents with the variety of ways they can score and make plays.
“P has the ability to go through you, go around you, and make acrobatic layups,” Black says. “He’s really good with his feet. Good balance inside the 3-point line, too, with his fadeaways and stuff like that. Franz will carve you up in the paint. He’ll get physical with you, and he’s 6-foot-10. It’s two nightmares—two nightmares to guard. Pick-and-roll, off-ball action, whatever. It’s a hard guard for teams.”
That’s why teams crowd and pressure both of Orlando’s star forwards so aggressively. Paolo is an anomaly with increasing command of all his considerable gifts, burdened with playing through multiple encroaching defenders at all times. Sometimes Banchero’s response is to settle for pull-up jumpers. It’s the path of least resistance that makes his scoring game a little more erratic than it should be. It’s also difficult to keep Banchero from getting to his spots without that kind of help. Some defenses make it a team effort and wind up getting picked apart anyway.
“He’s an unbelievable passer,” Mosley says. “He has such a great feel and recognition of what’s happening and where guys need to be on the floor.” Franz has shown real growth in his own capacity to organize, graduating from exploiting the advantages in front of him to engineering the advantages of his choosing. He’ll even direct specific teammates to the corner or the dunker spot—which the Magic call the bodega—based on which smaller defender he’d like to see in rotation. “That’s something that he wasn’t doing as much,” Banchero says. “But ever since he’s had the opportunity to really take that lead, he’s starting to control and manipulate and pick what actions he wants to run.”
The future of the Magic lies somewhere between them. It’s not enough for two similarly sized costars to be deferential. They have to play considered basketball. Meticulous basketball. They have to deliberately create what comes easily to so many other teams. And maybe they could, given how much both of Orlando’s stars have to offer even without the ball. Paolo, unlike other multitalented bigs, is an incredibly willing screener. Franz, unlike other playmaking wings, is an eager cutter. Their games are just starting to take shape, and the more they play together, the more their styles will stretch and bend around each other. Banchero, in particular, is somehow both an unmistakable star and a blank canvas. He might have the broadest film study of any player in the NBA; at one point while sidelined, he was blending tape of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Al Jefferson, and Joe Johnson, like some sort of basketball mixologist.
“I feel like I have a play style,” Banchero says, “but if I’m able to take little things from random guys who all were masters of different things, then that’s how I get better.”
Banchero has also spent time watching how Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic work against multiple defenders, an all too relevant concern in Orlando. The Magic are, as ever, in desperate need of shooting. They’ve converted just 30.5 percent of their shots from the 3-point range this season, tied for the worst mark of any team since 2012. They’ve also ranked near the bottom of the league in 3-point percentage in eight of the past 10 seasons, giving a decade’s worth of defenses all the more reason to pack the paint. Never has that played out more painfully for the Magic than in last year’s playoffs: a seven-game series loss against the Cavs that eventually turned into medieval warfare.
Signing Caldwell-Pope to a three-year, $66 million contract over the summer felt like a direct response, and was intended to relieve some of the pressure on the team’s spacing. Yet one of the league’s steadiest shooters over the previous five years has gone suddenly cold, because this is Orlando and that’s what happens here. The Magic do what they can, nonetheless, to feign spacing with movement and to stretch the impact of every potential shooter on the floor. Spot-up targets are often stationed well beyond the arc, to what NBA teams call the “four-point line.” Suggs, who is certainly no stranger to a deep 3, took the vast majority of his long-range attempts from more than 25 feet out. Caldwell-Pope, da Silva, and even Black (who’s shooting 29 percent from deep) are letting it rip from way out there. If the threat of those shooters registers at all, they’ll pull a defender one step farther from the action.
It hasn’t been enough. When Cleveland and Orlando met for a rematch last week, the once-deadlocked rivals couldn’t have been further apart. The Cavs won by 40. This Magic team is spirited and well intentioned, but there isn’t enough smoke and mirrors in the world to stop playoff opponents from loading up in the paint. The threat of what Paolo and Franz can do is too great—and too damaging on a scheme level. Maybe this is the cost of being unconventional by design. Since Weltman took over as president of basketball operations in 2017, the Magic have selected 10 players in the first round of the draft. Nine of them have fit a particular formula in terms of physical profile, wide-ranging skill set, and positional versatility. (The other is Cole Anthony.) They’ve picked up a few shooters along the way (KCP, da Silva, Jett Howard), but only those that otherwise fit the mold. Maybe it’s all a big wing too far—and a team with these dimensions is bound to have glitches in the basic execution of its offense. Even revolutions have logistical concerns. Orlando’s are here and in full effect, muddling whatever the Magic might be.
T
here is 6 feet of concrete beneath the floor of Suggs’s Orlando apartment, and 6 feet of it above his ceiling—enough, he surmises, for a live dribble not to bother the neighbors. He would cross up imaginary defenders on his way to the kitchen and reject an actual ghost screen to make a break through the doorway. When he would retreat to the living room to fire up his PlayStation, the ball came with him. “It’s just being one with the basketball,” Suggs says. It reminds him of the drills he used to run with his dad when he was growing up in the Twin Cities: sometimes in the driveway, but also in the house, around the neighborhood, or, in the more hospitable months, even on the golf course. They were drills from a time when Suggs was a point guard in a more traditional sense, with more straightforward responsibilities.
Even though Suggs didn’t initiate the offense for Orlando on a full-time basis, the Magic had intended for him to take on a larger playmaking role this season. Suggs spent part of last summer running point for USA Basketball’s select team under Mosley, organizing a different collection of up-and-coming players, and another part out in Santa Monica, working with longtime NBA assistant Phil Handy to find even greater confidence with his handle. “Part of it is being comfortable with the rock so that it’s not even a thought,” Suggs says. “Where dribbling and handling the ball under pressure isn’t something that I’m actively thinking about. So I can do that second nature while I’m putting the team together and orchestrating us into spacing and into sets and accomplishing what we wanna do.”
When Suggs was still active, all of the Magic’s other injuries pushed him into even more of that orchestration than he or the team could have anticipated. Suggs had the ball in his hands twice as much as he did last season, according to tracking data from NBA.com. He also barely shared the floor with Banchero and Wagner, which hindered the Magic as they tried to find their rhythm. Lineups featuring all three—in a tiny dose this season and a fuller sample last season—have worked well. They simply required Suggs to walk an even finer line, to constantly recalibrate the balance of his contributions.
The Magic clearly miss Suggs. They miss his edge. His savvy. His full-court, nonstop, dribble-killing pressure. Orlando is 20-15 this season with Suggs in the lineup and 9-18 without him. An unusually flexible Magic team may require an unusually flexible point guard. After all, the same criteria that brought Orlando to draft Banchero and Wagner led them to Suggs. The difference is that he was a big, physical guard already accustomed to running the point. Suggs had never really played off the ball until he came to Orlando, where it suddenly became a critical part of his job. “That taught me to be a role player,” he says. “To do the little things. To kind of look at what a star or a main ball handler has to deal with from an outside perspective.” It taught another former dual-threat quarterback, in other words, how to moonlight as a receiver.
Orlando’s free-form style can get clunky, but it forces players to evolve. To grow. It also demands that those players—most in the first few years of their careers—find ways to work around one another without the guardrails of a defined system or the natural order that comes with having a true lead guard.
“It gets complicated at times,” Carter says. “But the beauty of it is that I feel like guys make the right play—or at least try to.”
The Magic are still a concept in search of an offense. The intention is good, but the spacing isn’t. There’s a lot of collective playmaking, but also a lot for a young team to learn in putting that playmaking to use. It’s hard to tell whether this Magic roster yearns for a steady hand at the point or simply needs more room to find that dependability in themselves. These are giant, virtually unprecedented lineups led by a 22-year-old and a 23-year-old. Over the past few months, Orlando has played like it. The discovery process is ongoing—and the front office has so far opted to keep the roster intact to buy time for a fascinating core to sort itself out. Wagner and Suggs are locked in on big-money extensions, and Banchero is due for one later this year. Orlando also extended Carter’s deal and renegotiated Isaac’s through 2029. The Magic re-upped Bitadze, Mo Wagner, and Gary Harris on flexible near-term contracts. The rise of the Magic to this point has been inextricable from the team’s continuity. But no roster lasts forever.
“Look, the CBA doesn’t really allow you to just keep developing talent and keep everybody,” Weltman says. “At some point, decisions must be made.”
And not just because of the escalating salaries and contract timing. There comes a point when every team has to make a choice between what got it this far and what it needs to move forward. Would the Magic still be the Magic if they traded for a smaller, more traditional point guard? Would they still be the Magic if, in the name of balance, they added a deadeye shooter who’s something of a liability on defense? These are the existential concerns of leveling up. There are prospective trades out there for the Magic in all shapes and sizes, including bigger, splashier deals that could revamp the team as we know it.
Beyond Banchero and Wagner, Orlando has its full complement of draft picks and then some, including Denver’s first-rounder this year, a collection of quality players on reasonable, movable deals, and another wave of interesting prospects still in development. “Our no. 1 priority—our North Star—is to develop the young talent on our roster because it’s considerable,” Weltman says. “I also believe that if those trades do get made, that talent is one of the reasons we’ll be one of the teams that gets called.” Black has carved out a playmaking role with the Magic this season but also turned heads around the league in the process. Howard is a longer-term project but an interesting young shooter all the same. Mosley wasn’t expecting to rely so much on da Silva so soon, but doing so has allowed the first-year forward to showcase his adaptability.
There are more interesting players in Orlando than a healthy Magic team can accommodate. That kind of excess is fuel for the trade machine, which can all too easily churn out packages for a scoring guard like Anfernee Simons—who is such a natural trade candidate for Orlando that one of Simons’s former teammates tried to play matchmaker.
“I think they are a really good young team, and they are doing a really good job,” onetime Trail Blazer (and current Hornet) Jusuf Nurkic said after a game against the Magic, per Jason Beede of the Orlando Sentinel. “They have a really good coaching staff, but I think they are missing one player. I can’t name it, but that’s my little fella from Portland. … I think they are waiting and missing one player to be a really good team.”
Simons isn’t an exact fit for the Magic archetype. Yet making a play at contention requires adding talent, and talented players usually require teams to bend in their philosophy. At some point, an up-and-coming club needs to push in its chips: to trade the future for the present, and valued, homegrown talent for something transformative. It could be an out-and-out star. It might be a cornerstone that stabilizes the lineup.
“I can say that most of our competitors have made those trades,” Weltman says. “We haven’t. We haven’t yet.”
It’s fair to wonder whether Orlando missed a vital opportunity to improve its roster at the trade deadline, especially with the team so starved for shooting. A little boost could have gone a long way; even in this trying season, the Magic are 18-7 when they shoot at least 32 percent from distance. Then again, maybe that trend is a case for patience—to save the picks and the prospects for a bigger move down the line and bet instead on this group finding some kind of rhythm. The energy of the team is clearly off, but Orlando made 35 percent of its 3s last season with a remarkably similar (albeit much healthier) roster. The bones of a team that won 47 games last season are still there.
“Orlando is a very, very dangerous team,” Giannis Antetokounmpo told reporters after a game against the shorthanded Magic. “A young team, a very, very big team. They can give a lot of teams problems.” Including, at times, the defending champions. While the Magic got smoked the last time they met the Celtics, Orlando has been one of the only defenses—along with Giannis’s Bucks—to give Boston’s offense any real, consistent trouble.
At its best, Orlando plays like Boston’s dark mirror: rangy and versatile, but trading in shooting for pure physicality. That physicality creates friction. The intricately designed mechanisms of the Celtic offense lag slightly when they have to run through and around burlier Magic defenders, putting an otherwise dominant team slightly out of rhythm. “They have a system,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla says. “They have a DNA about their physical defense and the way they play, so regardless of who’s in, who’s out, you know what you’re getting from that team.” Orlando is the rare club with enough size on the wing to contend with both Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown and the versatility across the board to keep up.
“Boston very often switches 1 through 5, and that causes problems for a lot of teams,” Suggs says. “OKC a lot of times is the same thing—they can switch down the line because of how they’re built. We have the same makeup to do so, which is cool. It’s dope. It gives us something to chase.”
When you prompt NBA coaches and executives about where the game is going, many will describe the versatility of the Magic—either by name-checking Orlando specifically, or describing its roster in concept. “Those teams that can give you two and three and four players of that 6-foot-8 ilk that can do everything—can score, can pass, can make plays—I would think that has gotta be the way of the future,” one general manager told The Ringer. The Magic took that vision and stretched it to 6-foot-10. That’s a lot to live up to, but it’s telling that so many in the league are wary of the exact way Orlando plays. Opposing stars still speak with weary admiration after their bouts with the Magic, flagging the demands Orlando puts on them.
Everything is hard. Everything is earned. The Magic might not know how they’ll score, but they know who they are. Now all they need is to be healthy enough to show it.End of article
