Orlando Magic Power Rankings Roundup: Signs of life, even in death

The Orlando Magic’s playoff dreams are officially over, but the team is still showing signs of life and playing its best basketball in months.

The Orlando Magic have known for a long time their Playoff dreams were not likely to come to fruition. They could, until Tuesday night, hold onto the belief that they were at least mathematically still alive in the hunt. That is no longer the case.

The Playoff dream for 2017 is officially over. The team has had a long time to come to grips with this. A long time.

But even with this reality in place for quite some time, the Magic have tried to keep pushing forward and have kept trying to take some momentum into the offseason. The Magic have not had the season they wanted, but they want to begin building for their 2018 season.

Since the All-Star Break, the Magic are 6-11. They have won three of their last six games. Modest for sure. But for a team on pace for 30 wins, it is certainly something worth pointing out.

The Magic are playing some very good basketball of late. At least, for them — Russell Westbrook supernovas aside.

Elfrid Payton is a direct reason for this. He is averaging 12.7 points per game, 7.6 rebounds per game and 7.9 assists per game in March. That is some extremely strong play. The Magic have their attacking guard who is helping create for just about everyone.

The Magic have had some inconsistency around him, but at least Payton seems to have stepped his game up and carried a lot of the team with him.

There are still problems, of course. The Magic’s 21-point collapse to Russell Westbrook and the Oklahoma City Thunder stands out. It is still part of a string of games where the Magic had double-digit leads in the fourth quarter and simply lost it in the end. That is not a good sign of a team trying to learn to win.

Orlando still has many lessons to learn. And even their improvement and good play seem to come with some caution and guarded optimism.