Orlando Magic Top 25: The Nos. 11-15 best players in Orlando Magic history
15. Grant Hill (2001-07)
High/Low: 12/19
By Dar-Wei Chen
If everything went according to plan with Grant Hill, he likely would have landed somewhere in the top five of this list.
When the Orlando Magic paired him up with Tracy McGrady in the summer of 2000, they envisioned a high-flying duo of do-it-all wing players that, along with Mike Miller, would create major height and athleticism mismatches when Hill manned the “point forward” role.
At his best, Hill was a legitimate challenger to Michael Jordan’s throne as the dominant star of the league. He was supposed to lead Magic teams that would battle the Los Angeles Lakers in multiple Finals for post-Jordan supremacy (I get sad thinking about the epic Finals series we were all robbed of with Hill’s injuries and Tim Duncan not coming to Orlando).
It is not much of a stretch to say that during his Pistons years, he was some combination of LeBron James‘ versatility (dribbling, court vision, size, defense, rebounding, finishing around the rim, basketball IQ) and Russell Westbrook’s athletic explosiveness – he was that good.
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We all know what happened instead. Various injuries plagued his time with the Magic, causing him to miss hundreds of games and limiting his effectiveness in many of the games he did play.
His popularity remained high with fans, as evidenced by his being voted an All-Star starter in 2005 at the first sign of “old Grant Hill” coming back. But he never played at a level even close to what he was in Detroit.
For the Magic, perhaps the only silver lining of Hill’s repeated injuries is that McGrady broke out as a superstar because of the heavy responsibilities thrown his way.
It is difficult to properly rate Hill among the Magic’s all-time players because his time in Orlando was so unfulfilling relative to expectations. That he was injured for so much of his Magic career was not necessarily his fault – by all accounts, he was someone who worked very hard on getting his body right and no one wanted to come back and return to domination as much as he did.
But performance on the court has to be the dominant factor in any list like this one, and his leaving town in 2007 left a bad taste in the Magic fans’ mouths (some were unhappy he did not give the Magic a “hometown discount” for his services after all of the unfulfilling years — although the Magic were interested in moving on from Hill), especially after he started playing relatively healthy seasons for the Phoenix Suns in his mid-to-late 30s.
Perhaps the largest indictment of his Magic tenure is that no on-court moments stand out in particular. It just seemed like a constant slog of waiting for him to return to the court. And, when he did, he often was not totally right.
Therefore, ranking him at No. 15 all time on the Magic seems about right.
Grant Hill was so good that even him playing about one-third of possible games (and most of them at somewhere from 50-80 percent effectiveness) is enough for him to beat out other players on a franchise’s all-time list. But there is still so much more that could have been achieved.
It is not necessarily his fault those achievements were not realized. But for the purposes of this list, he can only be graded by what he actually did. And that gets him to this spot.