The Orlando Magic are a far better team when multiple hands get in on the playmaking duties.
There is no doubt Elfrid Payton is the Orlando Magic’s best creator.
However, when Evan Fournier, Victor Oladipo and Mario Hezonja all together get in on the act, the offense becomes that much tougher to stop. When this happens, Orlando begins to look like a real, breathing playoff team, not an apathetic product of a season gone awry.
It is almost like watching a team unsure what exactly to believe about itself after a full season. The Magic began the year looking like a true playoff team and wandered through the new year in a daze, before finally gaining momentum past the point at which the season still held out playoff hopes. It has been a strange concoction of both tough standout basketball and efforts that scarcely resembled such.
But the Orlando Magic typically are a team heavily reliant on playmaking from the point guard position. Most teams are. Orlando should be committed to letting Elfrid Payton do what he does best, in creating for others with his penetration and pace. He is still honing his skills but premiere floor generals do not grow on trees, so Orlando is patient.
It really does begin with Elfrid Payton. He can be downright brilliant and nasty with the ball in his hands.
But Payton does not work alone. Or, at least he does not have to.
And when the Magic get their secondary and tertiary playmakers involved, the offense becomes considerably more difficult to stop.
Against the Miami Heat, Orlando was without Victor Oladipo’s playmaking for the majority of the second half as he received a cut that required six stitches and suffered a concussion on the hit.
But Hezonja and C.J. Watson both stepped up into his role seamlessly.
“That’s what we need to win games,” Evan Fournier said. “Any time you have a guy coming off the bench to help the group, it’s a plus. C.J. did a great job at the end of the game. He had big shots. It was big time for us.”
The Magic average 23.6 assists per game as a team this season (good for No. 7 in the league), and in the 112-109 win over the Miami Heat the Magic had just that, 23 assists. But Orlando did something different that ended up making a difference, namely keeping its turnovers down (only 10).
A 2.3-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio is good for a guard. For a team it is superb. On the season, Orlando has a 1.7-to-1 ratio. The Magic were crisp moving the ball against Miami and making that extra pass resulted in some easy looks at the rim.
The Magic were crisp moving the ball against Miami and making that extra pass resulted in some easy looks at the rim.
Whether it was Payton, Evan Fournier or Mario Hezonja creating the looks, Orlando was getting good shots. The Magic shot 52.4 percent from the floor and four of five starters shot 50 percent or better from the field. Fournier had what may have been his best game of the season, finishing with 28 points, seven assists and seven rebounds.
“When has these kind of games where he becomes another playmaker for us, it’s really good for us,” coach Scott Skiles said. “He has good vision, there is no reason he can’t do that more often.”
Fournier also made the play that gave Orlando the go-ahead bucket, finding a cutting Nikola Vucevic after curling off a screen Vucevic set. With teams so obligated to close out on Fournier at the arc, it only eases his ability to make plays for others.
Hezonja, too, will find the same benefits as his career develops.
Evan Fournier did such a stellar job of both looking for his offense and involving teammates. That type of masterful point-forward type of play had not really been seen since the days of Hedo Turkoglu a half-decade ago. Magic fans are well aware of how beneficial it can be to have the 2 or 3 within the offense spearheading more plays.
The Magic are not really a team that has to rely on Payton to create all the offense. That point perhaps does indeed bear repeating.
Moving off the ball is a lost art at times. But Payton, too, can find himself offense without the ball in his hands. He is very good at executing give-and-go’s and he also is like a worm along the baselines, able to find good looks through traffic at the rim.
There are so many ways Payton can hurt a team, but most of the time we are accustomed to him doing it with the ball in his hands. As a cutter, he can be devastating at times, and he works well playing off Oladipo in this role.
With Fournier and Hezonja both looking to make more plays, Payton can work on these off-ball skills and become a more dangerous scorer for the Magic.
And perhaps that is the real hidden benefit in having multiple playmakers: Everyone becomes more dangerous.
The Magic had to adjust to playing the majority of the second half without Victor Oladipo, but Fournier played all but two minutes in the game and C.J. Watson also did a good job filing in for Oladipo.
It was a team effort.
And that is what wins NBA games, guys stepping up and filling what the team is lacking. It requires cognizance not just of what the team is doing, but what is further necessary to ensure the win.
Maybe some of these points regarding team play are pretty obvious. But in a four-season stretch so heavy in losses, sometimes we tend to forget just what a winning team does. The acceptance of mediocrity leads to losing sight of some of these things.
Why? Because it does not take a mastermind to realize that with multiple playmakers an offense is going to be much more difficult to stop.
And it is also not a tremendous leap of logic to know that keeping turnovers down and moving the ball will lead to good shots and a high field goal percentage. The ongoing use of logic solidifies that an unselfish team is best in most cases.
The real disconnect is how difficult it can be to coax that type of team play out of an NBA team. To get five guys simultaneously sharing the glory can be tough—even at lower levels of play. The Magic certainly struggled with that, leaving this style of play back in December for some unknown reason.
They have found that again, inspiring some confidence.
The teams that consistently can capture that magic in a bottle are the ones that are staples of the postseason, and the Magic at this point are only a tough and versatile team at its absolute best.
The Magic can make an effort to develop a system of relying on one another and getting contributions from surprising sources. When the team begins to grasp some of these finer points and develops true chemistry, the real steps forward can be made.
For the time being, suffice it to say the Magic have made progress. The season has not been in vain. And knocking off a Miami Heat team so badly in need of a victory is a strange yet awesome feather in Orlando’s cap.