One of the NBA’s great recent runs of futility could finally be nearing an end.
The Orlando Magic don’t carry the league’s longest active playoff drought – that dishonor belongs the Charlotte Hornets – but there’s a real case to be made that no NBA fanbase has dealt with as much frustration over the past decade or so as folks in mid-Florida. They’ve won just two playoff games in the past 11 seasons, dropping five straight postseason series dating back to their Dwight Howard and Stan Van Gundy heyday.
Other franchises have gone through similar or even longer gaps without advancing in the playoffs; the Minnesota Timberwolves haven’t won a round since 2004. The Magic, though, have failed in especially maddening ways.
Consider this: In those same 11 seasons, the Magic have finished in the NBA’s bottom-10 for per-possession offense every single year. Their rank among all 30 teams offensively, starting with last season and proceeding all the way back to 2012-13: 26, 29, 29, 23, 22, 25, 28, 22, 27, 29, 27. It’s a real feat to be so consistently bad on one end of the court for so long given how cyclical the NBA tends to be.
Could it all be over after this year?
As of this writing, the Magic are second in the Eastern Conference and sit 16th in per-possession offense for the season (14th, and slightly above average, when filtering out garbage time and end-of-quarter heave shots). Clearly the surprise team of the NBA at the quarter-pole, they boast top-five marks on defense and for overall net margin. If the season ended today, they’d have homecourt advantage in the first round with the chance to put more than a decade of fruitlessness in the rearview.
The Magic have wildly outstripped any preseason projections; in October most Vegas lines said they’d win 37 or 38 games this season, a mark they’re currently on pace to hit before the All-Star break. Naturally the question has to be asked: Is it sustainable, or are Orlando riding a hot streak that will subside and yet again dash fans’ hope?
Jump-shooting is often the first area examined when looking into the future predictability of a team’s performance – it’s extremely variable and takes a good chunk of the season to stabilize. Good news there, Magic fans: If anything, your squad has actually been slightly unfortunate here on the whole.
For starters, that league-average offense isn’t being propped up by streaky jump-shooting – quite the opposite, in fact. The Magic are a borderline bottom-five team in three-point shooting accuracy for the year, and dead last in midrange shooting (one of just four NBA teams below 40% on all midrange shots). The roster was expected to be short on sharpshooting, sure, but not by quite this much.
Meanwhile, coach Jamahl Mosley – the easy Coach of the Year favorite early on – has his team hellbent on attacking the rim. The Magic are attempting a borderline-insane 42.4% of their shots at the rim, per Cleaning the Glass, which would be the highest share of any NBA team since the 2018-19 Lakers. Teams around the NBA average roughly 32% of their shots from this range; it’s been an obsession in Orlando, and with good reason.
That starts with 2022 first overall pick Paolo Banchero, who was already a strong rim finisher as a rookie and has entered the game’s elite territory here as a sophomore. Banchero is too quick for guys his size and has started to realize it; get too aggressive denying his perimeter touches and he’ll just burn you back door for an easy rim run:
Just put a quicker guy on him then, right? Wrong. Even if you pick him up three-quarters of the way down the court, he’ll methodically burrow his way to the cup:
He’s even roasting teams who are prepared for his skill set.
The Toronto Raptors are a good defensive squad with ostensibly ideal personnel to combat a guy like Banchero, with multiple big wings always on the floor. They execute the switch well on this play, seemingly leaving no easy opening. Banchero simply hits Precious Achiuwa with a mean crossover, then finishes through him for an and-one:
Banchero may be the head of the snake, but he’s far from the only one. The Magic know size for their position is often a key edge up and down the lineup.
Emerging star Franz Wagner mostly plays small forward despite being 6ft 9in, often towering over his matchup. He’s responded to an early-season jump-shooting slump by getting inside even more often; when the jumper inevitably returns to form, watch out. Centers Goga Bitadze and Moritz Wagner have been mashing fools in the paint all year long. The Magic are a good offensive rebounding team and an even better one at converting those second chances into points, too.
Scoring this way is painful. It takes effort – physical and mental – to accept the pounding that NBA defenses give you down low, possession after possession. The buy-in Mosley is getting here across his roster is no small feat.
Could certain individuals be due for some regression in distinct offensive areas? Certainly.
Banchero’s 39% mark from deep feels a bit lucky. He was just a 30% shooter beyond the arc as a rookie, and iffy midrange numbers have mostly stayed the same this season; it’s a fair bet he’ll struggle to maintain that. Likewise for spark plug Jalen Suggs, who was a 27% career three-point shooter coming into the year but is now canning 37%. Is Moritz Wagner likely to keep shooting 62% from the field when he was at 49% across five prior NBA seasons? Probably not.
These are marginal trends, though, not hugely unsustainable mirages.
Meanwhile, the defense is as advertised and then some. Opponents are actually hitting jumpers at slightly higher rates than analytically inclined types would expect, but it hasn’t mattered. This group is simply elite across the board.
Many teams that force tons of turnovers do so at the expense of their defensive rebounding or vice versa. It’s hard to stay home for rebounds if you’re taking calculated gambles and chasing steals. Take the Thunder for example, who are tops in the NBA in forcing turnovers but dead last on their defensive glass.
The Magic are a huge exception, one that highlights the size and length of this roster. They force the third-highest rate of cough-ups in the league but also have the third-highest defensive rebounding percentage. Winning the possession battle so convincingly is a huge nightly edge – and one that feels entirely sustainable. They’ve done it with starting center Wendell Carter Jr sidelined for all but five games, too.
The playoffs are likely, at least per the quants: Even the most pessimistic projections peg Orlando at well over 70% postseason probability, with some as high as 98%. The Magic have their sights set higher, though: An end to their decade-plus run without a series win feels attainable.
Questions will need to be answered to make it happen. Are Banchero and Franz Wagner ready to carry an offense in a playoff setting at such a young age? Will Orlando’s lack of a traditional “lead” ball-handling guard (Markelle Fultz is closest, but has both durability and shooting issues) hurt them when opponents home in on limiting touches for the stars? Will the Magic still be able to get to the rim at such incredible rates when defenses have scouted their tendencies more intimately? Maybe most importantly, will the roster’s limited shooting eventually catch up to them?
Don’t forget: This may not be the finished product. Orlando are the only team in the NBA who don’t owe a single future draft pick to any other team; they hold two extra first-rounders and a bunch of seconds plus all their own picks. The longer they remain in the East’s top-six playoff picture, the easier the case to make for pushing some chips in and adding talent at the trade deadline.
Whether one of the league’s most exasperating runs of futility is finally set to end remains to be seen. The Magic have shown that they’re anything but a flash in the pan, though, and have complicated what was already a crowded Eastern Conference playoff race.
