Southeast Division turned upside down
The Orlando Magic and the Charlotte Hornets meet for the first time in a critical Southeast Division battle. The division so far has been turned on its head
The Southeast Division was not supposed to look like this.
The projections were the Atlanta Hawks would have the inside track to repeating as division champions. The Washington Wizards would be the young, upstart team ready to take the next step. The Miami Heat were the old guard fighting to stay in the middle and stay relevant, with the potential to challenge.
The Orlando Magic and Charlotte Hornets? They were the teams on the outside no one was quite sure what to do with. They were the teams that had nice collections of talent but likely were not ready to compete at a high level.
Much less challenge for a division crown.
Sitting past the quarter pole of the NBA season, the Southeast Division has had to flip its narrative. The Hornets and Heat are tied in first place at 14-9, the Magic are third and in the Playoffs if the season ended Wednesday at 13-11. The expected frontrunners are in the bottom two positions. The Hawks are a disappointing 14-12 and the Wizards an even more puzzling 10-13.
The Southeast Division has been a puzzling mess, flipped upside down from the preseason predictions.
Divisions may not matter much for Playoff seeding anymore, but the way these teams have begun to bunch up, the four division games the Magic will play against the others in the Southeast do bring some form of added importance.
“All the division games are important, especially now with our teams being pretty close record wise,” Nikola Vucevic said. “Each game counts. And they all are going to matter in the end.”
The Hornets have been one of the biggest surprises in the NBA to this point. The defensive mentality that helped them reach the Playoffs in 2014 seemed to give way in Steve Clifford’s second year.
They had the third worst offense in the league last year with a 97.6 offensive rating and the defense had a minor fall to ninth in the league at 101.0 defensive rating. Charlotte could not survive such poor offense. Those numbers have flipped in both categories this year as the Hornets boast the sixth best defense in the league now at 98.6 points allowed per 100 possessions (one tenth of a point better than the Magic) and the fifth best offense in the league at 104.4 points per 100 possessions.
Charlotte’s spread-the-floor attack has started to turn heads around the league, mixing the skilled playmaking and scoring of Kemba Walker with the do-everything play of a healthy and resurgent Nicolas Batum to go with the inside play of Al Jefferson, who will be serving the first game of a five-game suspension Wednesday.
The formula has worked well for them.
The matchup Wednesday is a really intriguing one with two teams playing above their expectations. The Magic and Hornets share a few similarities in the way they want to play, with both focusing on defense first and trying to initiate ball movement to unlock the offense.
“They play both sides of the ball,” Scott Skiles said. “I don’t want to see teams are mirror images of each other because they have a better record than us. They try to play good, solid, tough defense. They try to run. Walker is an upper-level point guard. They spread the floor. They have bigs who can shoot, we have bigs who can shoot. There are a lot of similarities.”
The Magic have played their part in turning the Southeast Division on its head too though. No one has quite been able to peg the Magic.
Orlando’s defense has experienced quite the turnaround and the team seems ahead of schedule on its revitalization. The Magic have dealt with their own inconsistency, but have shown plenty of signs that they are going to hang around this playoff race.
I joined the BangTheBook Radio show on Tuesday to discuss the Magic, the matchup with the Hornets and the Southeast Division:
The Magic and the Hornets will be looking to maintain their hot starts and hold off the charges from everyone else in the division for as long as they can. It is still a long season.
But these games are still important even if divisions have lost some emphasis overall. The Eastern Conference is still very bunched up — teams 1-10 are separated by 3.5 games — and every conference game seems to matter.
These games help determine tiebreakers and create some separation or maintain contact. They do not have the atmosphere of Playoff games or late-season games with Playoff implications, but they certainly still have the same level of importance, if not the time pressure.
The Magic are 6-6 in the conference and 0-2 in the division, both losses to the Wizards, and so they need to pick up some of these games.
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The standings should settle in very soon. Teams are becoming who they will be for the rest of the season. Games like Wednesday night’s game against the Hornets will have major implications for the rest of the season.