Fansided Future Rankings: Orlando Magic’s future still dependent on a star

The Orlando Magic’s rebuild has been tied to internal development and the Draft. Without a star though, the Orlando Magic’s future is hard to predict.

Basketball is a somewhat unique sport.

Teams do win championships. The teams that move the ball and work together, sometimes giving up their individual goals or accepting reduced individual roles, are the ones that win.

But talent ultimately wins out. With the nature of seven-game series, the more talented, together team finds a way to win.

The trick of rebuilding is accumulating the right talent and building around the right star. The popular thing to do these days is build through the draft, finding stars to nurture through the NBA Draft and keeping that player locked in from beginning to tumultuous end.

It is just frankly hard to buy a star in free agency — especially without another star in place already — and trades always end up being exchanges of other team’s trash.

Ranking a team’s assets and where a team might be in that team-building process are always tricky propositions, as fun as those exercises might be.

And there is no doubt doing this does not look fantastic for the Orlando Magic.

Even though the team has turned a proverbial corner and started to compete and be in the Playoff conversation, it still feels like the team is a long way away from competing for championships, even with a slow, progressive growth.

Ti Windisch of Fansided put together his Future Power Rankings, trying to take a look at which teams will be the best teams five years from now. It is purely speculative, but the exercise has some merit.

He rated teams based on their young talent, their veterans, their draft pick stashes and finally confidence in the team to build a winner. That helps teams like the Celtics and Spurs stay high.

The results are not completely predictable — he has the Timberwolves as the No. 1 team in his future power rankings with Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns in tow, showing the power of back-to-back No. 1 overall picks (the Magic would know about that). But the reasoning for why the Magic come in 13th certainly is:

"There may not be one guaranteed star player in Orlando, but the Magic do have a compelling young group that they should be able to keep mostly intact for the next five seasons.Having Elfrid Payton, Victor Oladipo, Evan Fournier, Mario Hezonja, Tobias Harris,Nikola Vucevic, Aaron Gordon and Shabazz Napier on a roster is probably going to make a formidable team in 2020. Even though Orlando probably cannot keep all of them, they’ll come out of the next half-decade with some great homegrown talent.The only reason the Magic aren’t higher is because they have no surefire star player. Oladipo and Vucevic are close, but neither are locks to be truly great. If either of them do develop into a star, Orlando should end up being a top team five seasons from now."

As noted, the Magic have an abundance of young talent. What makes the team hard to predict is none of that talent has coalesced into much of anything yet.

There are no All Stars yet despite three years in the top five of the Draft and several trades to build up the roster.

This is not to say Rob Hennigan has made any wrong moves or the team is not where it is supposed to be. The Magic lost on back-to-back Draft Lotteries and had the second pick in one of the worst drafts the league has seen.

The basis of its rebuild was kind of cut out by sheer chance. They have needed to rely on internal player development to attract free agents to fill that final piece and take a step up. Some Playoff and meaningful game experience would also help.

What the Magic do from here in building their roster — the free agencies they sign or let walk, the way players develop and the money they spend — will determine their future as much as anything.

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Without top-end talent and the very best players in the league though, the Magic are probably not part of the championship conversation even five years from now.