Jonathan Abrams recently released an oral history of the 1995 Orlando Magic and their run to the Finals. Aside from nostalgia, we learned some things.
The Orlando Magic are not in the Playoffs this year. They are still rising from the bottom after losing their latest star and the climb has not been pretty or easy. It never is.
It makes fans want to think about happier times. About the times when the team was on top and the future was limitless.
That time was the mid-1990s for Magic fans, the first time the team became contenders and really the greatest time of potential in the franchise’s history. If the Thunder lucked into three top-10 picks, they were only copying the Magic’s luck in acquiring Shaquille O’Neal and Anfernee Hardaway through the Draft.
This was the team of the future and its window shut quicker than it opened with just one Finals appearance.
It is a group that is still talked about throughout the NBA. So much so that Jonathan Abrams of Grantland spent much of the last year putting together an oral history of the rise and fall of the Magic’s first great team. The team’s enduring legacy is still seen in the pace-and-space 3-point shooting of today’s NBA. Magic fans still feel the impact as that first team established the Magic as a franchise in the league.
The whole story is worth reading just to relive those days. In the following slides, we highlight the quotes and notes that caught our attention.
Next: Shaquille O'Neal and Los Angeles
Shaquille O’Neal may have always wanted to go to Los Angeles… or just Disney
"Pat Williams: [O’Neal’s agent Leonard Armato] said, “Why don’t you trade him to L.A.? Trade him to the Lakers.” [I told him], “Leonard, we’re not going to do that. We’ll start him right here.” Armato: I’m not saying I didn’t say that, but I don’t remember saying that. John Gabriel: There was a crowd gathered, and Shaquille sort of had yet to say that he wanted to be part of the Magic. I remember him stepping to the podium and he said, “I want to be where there is” — and then he [sang] the old Mickey Mouse thing — “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.” And everybody exploded in applause."
Yes, the world was very different when Shaquille O’Neal entered the league.
Orlando was nothing more than Disney with a three-year-old NBA franchise. There were no rookie-scale salaries and it was a task to sign a player that you drafted, not merely a formality.
It gave a lot of young players a lot of power (a lot more on that coming up later on in the post too).
It always seemed O’Neal’s presence in Orlando was larger than life. Actually, I am pretty sure that was the name of the VHS documentary on his rookie year. For the conspiracy theorists, O’Neal was always going to leave Orlando after his four years were up for Los Angeles specifically.
Feeding that conspiracy even more was a quote that came later in the piece. Armato said O’Neal’s initial inclination in free agency was to stay in Orlando. But his agent wanted him in L.A.
"Armato: Shaq told me, “I want to stay in Orlando.” Everybody thought I wanted him to come to L.A. In the back of my mind, I thought it would be cool if he came to L.A., but at the same time, if he wants to stay in Orlando, then that’s OK too. Jerry West: I think [Armato] was interested in having Shaquille here, but for a long time there was never any indication he would come. You’re just trying to pin people down and say, “Hey, look, if we do this, would you guys consider coming here?” When we traded Vlade [Divac], he knew we were serious about what we were trying to accomplish."
So, take that for what you will.
The story goes into detail what happened (or what everyone says happened) in the negotiations with O’Neal. Namely, several players in O’Neal’s draft class, without restricted free agency which did not exist yet, were getting $100 million contracts and the Magic were hesitant to give that to someone so young.
The market dictated he would get everything and more. The Magic balked and the Lakers swooped in. O’Neal repeated at his Hall of Fame entry earlier this year that it was a complete business decision. The Lakers had the money and got the man.
As O’Neal stated back in March at his Hall of Fame induction and said again in the oral history, he regrets leaving Orlando and the opportunity that remained to build a championship team. But business is business and he built his legacy elsewhere. It is all now part of O’Neal’s complicated legacy with Orlando.
For all it is worth, bygones appear to be bygones. Magic fans cheered O’Neal as he was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame.
Next: Anfernee Hardaway pushed himself onto the Magic's board
Anfernee Hardaway forced his way onto the Magic’s board & the Magic asked for five picks for him
"Pat Williams: Logically, it appeared Chris Webber all the way. That’s what we were going to do. [Then], the Sunday before the draft, John Gabriel got a call from Penny Hardaway and Penny said, “I know you’re not planning on taking me, but you should. I’m your guy.” So John said, “All right, come in Sunday and we’ll have a workout on Monday.” And the draft was Tuesday night! John Gabriel: Pat orchestrated a deal with Golden State to get three number ones along with keeping a high draft pick for Penny, who is in essence the first pick. I said, “Pat, how’d you get three number ones out of Golden State?” He said, “I asked for five.”"
When the Magic shocked the NBA world and won the Lottery for a second straight year in 1993, the going thought was taking the best player available was taking Chris Webber. It was that much of a no-brainer.
Yet, Orlando shocked even Magic fans when Pat Williams went out to face fans at the Draft watch party in Orlando Arena and tell them they were trading the consensus top overall pick for a relatively unknown, but accomplished combo-guard from little-regarded Memphis State.
Hardaway was one of those workout wunderkinds. But his workout was really different.
As detailed in the oral history, after Hardaway stormed in and demanded a second workout, the Magic more or less had a team pick-up game with Hardaway going up against veterans Anthony Bowie and Donald Royal, the Magic’s two best defenders even on that 1995 team.
Hardaway torched them. It became clear the Magic needed to pair their star center with a dynamic point guard.
The rest was history. And those three draft picks they got from Don Nelson‘s desperate need for a big man did not hurt too. They turned into Todd Fuller, Vince Carter (traded to Washington along with Scott Skiles, as was Fuller) and 2001 Rookie of the Year Mike Miller.
Next: Big men can sell
Shaquille O’Neal does not take no for an answer
"Shaquille O’Neal: When I was in college, my professor said, “I hope you save all your money because you can’t get endorsements. Big guys won’t sell.” We had a marketing [project]. He wanted us to create a product and sell them in class, so I brought in a Shaq shoe. I had a shoe and I had my Dunkman emblem on it. I had it like superglued on and I had a little B.S. commercial shot. He gave me a D. He said that ain’t going to work — that’s what he told me in front of the class. My mentality was all built off of criticism, proving other people wrong. That’s why I am who I am."
The going thought around the league is that big men do not sell.
Fans do not relate to them because, quite simply, most of us will never be 7-foot-1 behemoths who can just physically dominate the paint. It is a lot more fun to try crossovers and jump shots rather than post moves and dunks. It takes a finer craft.
O’Neal really changed that by taking control of his own brand. That design he slapped on that shoe became his logo and his brand. O’Neal’s Shaq-nosis shoe is one of the best selling shoes of all time and one of the best-looking shoes of all time. And O’Neal has tons of marketing ventures that he is still involved in (some more ridiculous than the last).
He turned himself into a marketing genius. A unique thing among big men.
O’Neal, for some reason, has always played with a chip on his shoulder. He has always taken slights from the media or otherwise and taken them to seeming extremes.
Those early 90s Magic teams were a marketing bonanza. Anfernee Hardaway and O’Neal were running the two hottest shoe commercial campaigns in the league at the time. Some professional jealousy might have derailed things by the time 1996 came around.
No doubt though Shaq could sell, and he knew it, bucking the age-old adage and proving one professor wrong.
Next: The team was super close, and connected by the chain of lakes
The Butler Chain of Lakes kept everything connected
"Brian Shaw: We had so much fun because we were all at the same point of our lives. None of us was married. Shaq, Penny, and I and Dennis Scott all lived in the same development and we lived on lakes. Nick Anderson lived on a different lake that was up a little ways from us, but all our lakes were connected. After practice, we had boats and we had WaveRunners and we would ride to one another’s house. This week, I may barbecue at my house and have everybody over, and Shaq would do it the next week."
What is probably most amazing about those 90s Magic teams was just how young they were.
The 1995 team had an average age of 27.6 years old at the end of the regular season. Their two biggest stars were 23 years old and 24 years old. With the exception of Tree Rollins, Anthony Bowie and Donald Royal, all the key players on the team were younger than 30 years old.
This was a young group really coming of age and coming into their own. You could not help but understand how it remained a college atmosphere — there is a story about Nick Anderson buying a sports car while in Houston during the 1995 NBA Finals, even though he could not drive stick. This team had a lot of growing up to do.
But part of what made them great was how close they were.
Yes, I lived on the Butler Chain of Lakes. I remember driving my grandfather’s boat around and seeing the Shaq logo on the side of a boat with Dennis Scott’s jet ski parked next to it. These guys were 20-somethings living the life with unlimited potential and no seriousness about time.
Maybe that is what was among their greatest strengths, along with their greatest weakness in the end. Particularly when the Problem of More came into play during the 1996 season and simply dominating was not enough.
Next: The idea of cap room, yeah the 1995 Magic did that too
The Magic created cap room, and that was their undoing
"John Gabriel: Cap room was a bit of a newfound commodity. We traded Scott Skiles to Washington and were going to use those funds to sign Horace, and the league initially disallowed it, saying that we weren’t getting fairly compensated, that we were only doing it to create cap room. We said, “That’s wrong because?”"
The NBA has had a salary cap ostensibly since the 1985 season. It has gotten more and more complex over time and free agency has changed the landscape of the league. Fans today are just as knowledgeable about what goes on during the season as they are what goes on in board rooms at the trade deadline and on draft night.
As the Magic were preparing to build their championship team, they wanted a veteran to help lead and guide the way but free up the point guard position for Penny Hardaway. That meant trading Scott Skiles.
What did the Magic do to get rid of Skiles? It might have been the first straight salary dump in league history.
The Magic traded Skiles with two first round picks acquired from the Warriors in the Hardaway deal for a future second round pick (which became Randy Livingston) and a future first round pick (which became Keon Clark). Essentially, Orlando traded its starting point guard for nothing.
What that did though was clear the cap room to sign Horace Grant, who was a really important voice in the locker room and a veteran defender to take the pressure off Shaquille O’Neal.
You can imagine everyone around the league getting upset at this knowing what was coming in Orlando.
Turnabout is fair play though. Everyone cried foul again when the Lakers traded George Lynch and Anthony Peeler along with several picks for two second round picks. These were two rotation players, mind you. That gave the Lakers enough cap room to offer O’Neal $120 million.
The Magic could not match. Or their low-ball offer was too far away and the extra cash was icing on the cake for the Lakers and O’Neal.
Next: The 1995 Bench
The 1995 bench wanted its chance and blames Brian Hill for the series loss
"Anthony Bowie: If they just utilized the whole bench during that series, I honestly believe we would have won. I’m sitting there for the first game. They can say I’m a bad guy or whatever they want, but sitting there for the first game and watching that we’re up 20 going into halftime, and you never take none of your bench players and let them play? Those [starters] are tired. I can hold my own on defense and they know that. Ain’t too many guys that are going to just blow past me or go around me or Donald Royal or other guys that we had on the bench. You can’t win an NBA Finals with six guys."
The NBA Finals turned into a disaster for the Magic. Let’s not dig into it any deeper than that.
To a man, everyone on the 1995 Magic believed and still believes that if they had closed out Game One it would have been a different series. Everyone on that team believes they are better than the Rockets — despite the sweep — and would beat them if given another chance.
Everyone wanted their chance.
In the Finals, the Magic starters played 831 minutes out of a possible 985 minutes in the series — roughly 84.4 percent — according to Basketball-Reference’s box score database. Donald Royal, a full-time starter during the season, played just one minute in the series. Brian Hill shortened his rotation to eight players during the Finals.
Anthony Bowie played just 26 minutes the entire series. He averaged 16.4 minutes per game in 77 games that season and 6.9 minutes per game in 17 Playoff appearances.
Hill was in his second Playoffs as a coach and was leaning extremely heavily on his starters. It was clear how emotionally drained the players were. The Magic’s bench wanted its opportunity. Maybe they had earned a little more trust in getting the Magic to that last stage.
Next: Penny Hardaway did not get along with his coach
Penny Hardaway and Chuck Daly did not get along
"Orlando Sentinel columnist Larry Guest: Daly opted out, even though he had two more years on his contract for some pretty good money. I was there at Daly’s house an hour or so after he announced that he was hanging it up. Penny sent over roses to Terry, who is Chuck Daly’s wife. [When] she [learned] it was from Penny Hardaway, she took the flowers and put them right in the trash. That was a pretty vivid indication of how Penny was regarded in the Daly household."
The oral history goes into the supposed player coup that ousted Brian Hill.
The Magic were a disaster that first year after O’Neal, and Hill could not reach his star player in Anfernee Hardaway. The team was drifting below .500 and a change needed to be made. Whether it was a player vote or however Hill was deposed, something very bad happened. The team quit on their coach.
The relationship with Hardaway and Hill did not seem to be so bad as the relationship between Hardaway and the Magic’s next head coach, Chuck Daly.
Daly accumulated a 74-58 record in two seasons at the helm. He finished .500 in his only full season, missing the Playoffs. In the lockout-shortened 1999 season, Daly helped the Magic to the top record in the East, but they lost to the 76ers in the first round. Daly left after that season.
Clearly this anecdote suggested Hardaway and Daly were not on the best of terms. And so a second straight head coach was killed off by Hardaway, and it was becoming clearer that the Magic and him needed to part ways.
Hardaway played 19 games in that first year under Daly, experiencing the first of his knee and ankle issues, and bounced back to play all 50 games in the lockout season. His scoring average dipped to 16.0 points per game in those final two years in Orlando.
Something was off about Penny and he knew it. His coach may have taken the brunt of it. And since Daly was a hard-driving coach, he probably grated on Hardaway who was almost certainly playing hurt those two years.
It was time to separate and both the Magic and Hardaway knew it at that time as the Magic’s golden era came to an end.
Next: Nick Anderson takes Shaq
We know who Nick Anderson has in the Shaq vs. Dwight debate and the ’95 legacy endures
"Nick Anderson: I used to have this conversation with Dwight Howard years ago. I used to tell him, “Shaquille O’Neal at your age, even at a younger age, he’d have killed you.” But he don’t seem to think so. I used to tell him, “Man, you just don’t understand. You caught Shaq on his elder years and you still really couldn’t do nothing with him. But a young Shaquille O’Neal? Ain’t nothing you could do but holler, ‘Help, help, help!’” Tree Rollins: I still make my home in Orlando. I just got my hair cut and even my barber was talking about those days. You would think they would be talking about the Dwight Howard days. They went to the championship round also, with the Lakers. But they always talk about those [Shaq and Penny] days. Those were great days."
Until someone says otherwise, the great debate in Magic history will be which center is the greatest player in Magic history? Dwight Howard or Shaquille O’Neal.
Howard has the longevity. O’Neal has the impact and establishment — not to mention gaudy offensive numbers. Both are worthy of the honor.
The 1995 guys have their guy’s back.
Nick Anderson would know better than anyone, having been around the franchise for both eras of Magic contention.
Howard’s teams may have actually won the championship, but really they were standing on the shoulders of the O’Neal teams. It was those 1995 teams that really revolutionized the use of the 3-point line that has become the vogue today.
Howard was really good, and by my estimation is the best player in Magic history. But no one can deny O’Neal’s impact and no one should be too upset if they disagree and think O’Neal was better in his four years in Orlando.
As far as impact, as good as that 2009 team was, the 1995 team was like the first love for this city. That is why the O’Neal and Hardaway departures still sting. This group was special to Orlando and there is a reason even 20 years later we still talk about this group reverentially and like it was yesterday.
Magic fans are just waiting for the next team to remind them of the limitless possibility this first group gave us all.
Next: The next five for Orlando Magic Hall of Fame Enshrinement