How far are the Orlando Magic from making the Playoffs?
The Orlando Magic are at the end of the season and will not be in the Playoffs. The future is uncertain and the team has to hope for the best moving forward
The regular season is about five hours from being over. The Orlando Magic have long since been eliminated from postseason contention and the season is limping to its merciful conclusion with one final 48 minutes of basketball at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
The Magic will finish with more wins than they did last year, but they are just as far away from the Playoffs in the standings.
This was the season Orlando was supposed to turn the corner. Maybe they would not be playing to the final day of the season, but they expected to be playing into March with something to play for. The Magic do not even have any ping pong balls to play for on this final day of the season.
The future is all the Magic have to hold on to.
A series of young, promising players is a good place to start. Victor Oladipo and Elfrid Payton look like a solid backcourt to build around moving forward. Nikola Vucevic is wrapped up in a long-term contract at what looks like a bargain with the cap increase that is set to come.
But that is clearly not enough. The Magic are what their record says they are. And that is a 25-win team that is 13 games out of the Playoffs. A team that has been surpassed by teams like the Bucks (15 wins last season) and the Celtics (25 wins last season) for Playoff spots in the watered-down Eastern Conference.
The Magic believed at one point they were these teams, or potentially these teams. They believed they could take that next step. As several players told Josh Robbins of the Orlando Sentinel, this season has been a disappointment. They though they were off to good things when they returned home from a West Coast road trip at 9-15.
Yet, here the Magic are. Just 16 more wins came after that December trip. And more bitter, bitter disappointment where the young team let the bad things snowball and get worse, with only glimpses into the bright future this team could have.
Three years into this rebuild, Magic fans want and demand to know when things will turn around. Rob Hennigan can get praised for strong draft picks — it is hard to argue with too many of his draft picks so far with Andrew Nicholson standing out and Aaron Gordon‘s up-and-down rookie season yet to be fully judged — but ultimately he has to deliver some results.
This league is built on wins and losses. The Magic are still very short on those — 68 in three years.
When will things turn around? There is no timeline, just the promise that it will happen when it happens.
“You can’t put time on this thing,” coach James Borrego said before the team’s final home game. “But I think we’re starting to see the makings of what a Playoff team could like for the Orlando Magic. This is real. I don’t think there is any false idea of what we’re looking at right now.”
Of course, then the Magic lost to the Knicks and then lost to the Heat. The effort was lacking. The positivity of a four-game stretch where the Magic won three games, two over Playoff opponents, had quickly faded. It seems that any time the Magic get a glimpse of something positive out of this season, it goes away equally as quickly.
Finding consistency has been as much the problem as anything else for this young team. The consistent inconsistency has been the most frustrating feature of this season. No one can put a timetable on this thing.
The Playoffs seem very far away. Too far away, almost.
The Magic’s core will remain intact this summer. Victor Oladipo and Elfrid Payton will remain. Nikola Vucevic will remain. If reports are to be believed, Tobias Harris will remain. Almost all of the key players will likely be on this roster next year.
The main change will be the head coach. That could certainly change a lot of things, raise the stakes for this group and change expectations. But this appears to be the group the Magic are growing with at the moment.
“This is a reality for us right now,” Borrego said. “If this group can grow this summer, get better. There is a lot of upside already just in this core group as it sits. Another summer under our belts, learning how to win, being more comfortable, there is a bright future. This group where it can go, we don’t know yet. But we’re starting to see the signs of a team that’s going to have a major impact in the Eastern Conference.”
There is upside. There is a chance things click into place. The Bucks and Celtics proved as much as anyone that things can change quickly. No team is out of the Playoff race when everyone is 0-0.
The Magic have beaten some good teams this year — the Bulls most recently — and they have lost to some bad teams — the Sixers and the Knicks. The potential for both a great team in 2016 and another horrendous team exists. No one seems to be running from that.
But how far is this team from the Playoffs?
As the 2015 season ends, it seems interminably far away. They are closer than pessimism may allow us to believe. But maybe farther than optimism will allow us too.
The future is as uncertain as ever for the Magic franchise. They wanted more clarity at this point of the season. They do not have it.
But every season proves to us, anything can happen. We just have to hit the reset button and be ready in October.