Orlando Magic’s youth performing among best in NBA
The Orlando Magic are not using youth as an excuse. But there is no denying most of their production comes from their young players for better or worse.
There is a fair amount of disappointment with the Orlando Magic’s current 30-43 record. The team started out 19-13 and collapsed in the 2016 calendar year. The defense fell off and the team struggled.
No one wanted to use youth as an excuse. This was a group that had suffered through three years of losing and was hungry to win. The franchise brought in a coach that demanded accountability and had a track record for whipping young, inexperienced teams into shape.
The Magic, as Skiles put it continually, would use their youth to their advantage. They would push the pace and be constantly on the attack.
Things obviously did not work out that way. The Magic have struggled and are now eliminated from the Playoffs.
And certainly one of the things the team was missing was a veteran to help stabilize the lineup and lead when the team got tight.
There should be no hiding from the team’s youth though. That was a major part of the rebuild for the last four years. The hope is that it would slowly begin to coalesce and turn into something. And while the fast start faded dramatically, the Magic continued to show some individual improvement among their key players and pick up more wins than the year before.
Orlando will certainly be looking for more in the final nine games, but the Magic have 30 wins and something resembling progress. And compared to other teams, they are doing that more with their young players than just about anyone.
Again, the Magic are a young team. They have an average age of 25.0 years old, the sixth youngest in the league. Portland, Utah and Boston have each taken advantage of their youth and succeeded. So the Magic could be playing better.
But from their players 25 years old and younger, the Magic are getting as much production as any other team.
Ian Levy of Nylon Calculus was curious as to who was getting the most production from their young players. He calculated the victories over replacement player from Basketball-Reference and compared it players’ ages.
For players 25 years and younger, the Magic have gotten the sixth most victories over replacement player behind the Golden State Warriors, San Antonio Spurs, Portland Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics and Utah Jazz. Orlando has 6.8 victories over replacement player from players 25 years and younger.
"At 23-and-under, the clear leaders are the Utah Jazz and the Orlando Magic. Both are teams that have been pegged as up-and-coming for a year or two now, but have failed to coalesce in the ways we’ve imagined. Still, with youthful cores both teams would still seem to be on an upward trajectory.Obviously, the age ranges are somewhat clumsy and can be heavily influenced by just one or two good players — for example see the 27-year-old (Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant) age bubble for the Oklahoma City Thunder. Still, the chart allows you to see each team’s talent in a chronological wave — rising, cresting, or crashing. I suppose the one thing you don’t want to be in this analogy is slack water (Sorry, Lakers)."