The NBA Draft Combine begins this week marking the first turn toward the NBA Draft. The Orlando Magic will have a lot of work to do in Chicago.
The NBA Draft process begins its first public turn as the league’s teams descend on Chicago along with 67 of the league’s draft prospects for the NBA Draft Combine this week.
The NBA Draft Combine is not as much of a spectacle as the NFL Draft Combine has become. Most of the major players still skip the agility drills. And some of the very best prospects are not even bothering to show up.
That is their prerogative to control the process. At this point, Markelle Fultz and Lonzo Ball are fairly confident they will be the top two. With Josh Jackson and Jayson Tatum feeling comfortable to fill out the top four.
They will have their chance to get out on the court in individual workouts at their leisure.
The NBA Draft Combine presents the first time for team personnel to interact with the prospects throughout the draft. It has more importance than just the drills and the five-on-five games for players to showcase themselves just a bit.
The next few days will be an exhaustive process as teams add more information to their ledgers and turn at least a more serious eye toward the NBA Draft.
As ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla likes to say, this is a job interview for the prospects. That is how they should treat it. And largely the most important aspects involve the interview process. That first interaction with team personnel.
The Orlando Magic will have a lot of work to do in Chicago this week.
Coach Frank Vogel and interim general manager Matt Lloyd will lead the team’s delegation at the Draft Combine. They will be reviewing prospects and interviewing them at the various interview sessions.
The Magic have a lot of work to do at this year’s combine.
They have potentially four picks in the top 35 picks to scout and prepare for. They have their first pick — the fifth best Lottery odds — and the 25th pick in the Draft. Two first round picks is a lot of weight and responsibility to deliver on. The Magic also have the 35th pick and potentially the 33rd pick, depending on if the Los Angeles Lakers land in the top three or not at next week’s NBA Draft Lottery.
There are a lot of prospects to see and prepare for and possibly meet. The teams are limited to how many interviews they can do. But they certainly will set up a good chunk of their individual workouts and their target list in Chicago this week.
There is a lot to get to and plenty to watch as the NBA Draft attention descends upon Chicago a week before the NBA Draft Lottery next Tuesday.
The Interviews
The league does its official measurements and records scores on agility drills and conducts five-on-five games with some of the lesser-known prospects trying to make a name for themselves. This is essentially the “combine” part of the NBA Draft Combine. This is what gets aired on TV and what everyone thinks about.
But the most important thing that will happen this week are the interviews. These are essentially job interviews and the first opportunity that teams have to sit down with prospects.
It is easy to look at a player’s game tape and understand his skills and see how he fits in with the roster or the vision of a roster. That is one aspect of the decision-making process. The other part is learning about who the player is as a person. That is where the interviews in the next two days come into play.
The interviews are limited. They amount to something like speed dating. There are only a certain amount of interview slots and the interviews are limited to roughly 30 minutes. These interviews are more introductions rather than full-on interviews.
But that first impression is important. Those introductions are important.
And the Magic are likely to get more out of these sit-down meetings than anything else. The Magic have a lot of information to gather at this Draft Combine. And the interviews will take on added importance as they sort through the candidates — and likely take notes for the new president of basketball operations once he is hired.
Focus on 25
Admittedly, the focus for many fans is on that high Lottery pick. The Magic went through a lot of suffering to land the fifth-best odds in the upcoming NBA Draft Lottery. And the team will have plenty of focus on it once they know where that pick lands.
The reality is that many of the top prospects for the upcoming Draft are not going to show up in Chicago. Among the expected top six or seven picks, only De’Aaron Fox and Markelle Fultz will attend this week. The Magic will certainly try to land interviews with them.
Orlando Magic
And neither of these players will not go through any of the agility drills. They are just there for the interviews.
But most likely, the attention for the team will have to turn to the team’s second pick in the first round. That means focusing on players like Syracuse’s Tyler Lydon, Oklahoma State’s Jawun Evans, Gonzaga’s Zach Collins and UCLA’s TJ Leaf among plenty others.
All these players will go through the agility drills and some may participate in the five-on-five games too. The Magic will see plenty of them on the court. But they will also want to get them in the interview room and beginning talking with them.
Unlike that top five pick, there are a lot of options later on in the draft. The team will have to sort through a lot more players to figure out the ones they want to target — both at 25 and early in the second round.
The week in Chicago is going to be spent less focused on the guys at the top and more focused on the guys for late in the first round.
Churning the rumor mill
NBA executives are like you and me. They procrastinate and wait for deadlines to make decisions. They also like to talk. And the industry itself is pretty incestuous (Rob Hennigan will surface on a team somewhere after next season just like Jacque Vaughn did with the San Antonio Spurs after he was fired and is now with the Brooklyn Nets).
Put a bunch of NBA executives in the same room together and eventually, they will start talking. It may be something basic or it may be hypothetical, but things will start moving on the NBA trade market with so many people in the same room.
Remember, the early list of Magic general manager candidates — including the first rumors of the team’s interest in Cleveland Cavaliers general manager David Griffin — leaked at the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament, a draft league for college seniors.
The NBA Draft Combine is a much bigger gathering of NBA executives and decision makers than the PIT. And so the conversations will begin.
While Matt Lloyd may not be the one making the ultimate decisions for the Magic on Draft night, he will lay the seeds for potential moves the Magic will make. Just like he is a continuation of the conversations former general manager Rob Hennigan may have had toward the end of the season as the team began planning its future.
The direction is unclear, but the Magic have to see what is out there at least.
As I detailed earlier this week, the Magic are going to have to rely on trades to improve their roster. The team roughly has $13-16 million in cap space. That is likely only enough to sign some role players to come off the bench rather than anything significant. So if Orlando is interested in making significant improvements, it will have to come in a trade.
None of the deals the Magic begin discussing may leak this week. They may be seeds for something that happens later on this year. These initial conversations will be important as the magic try to figure out what is available to them.
But some things will leak. It is impossible not to with so much media and executives in one place. And so the NBA’s rumor mill will begin churning again.
Agility Drills and 5-on-5s
As much as all the off-court intrigue will fill the day and perhaps overshadow what is going on in Chicago, this is still a Combine, right? This is a chance to see some of these prospects on the court and get the official measurements, watch them in five-on-five situations and going through some of the league’s agility drills.
Some of these are kind of silly drills. There is no 40-yard dash and no one really cares about how fast you can run. There is no one number from this Combine that seems to perfectly encapsulate skill or affect draft status.
The only thing that usually matters with these drills and measurements is if someone underperforms. The NBA Draft Combine is a place where you can hurt yourself more than you can help yourself if you are a first round pick.
There will undoubtedly be some surprises. There will be someone who measures bigger or longer than anticipated or has a much better vertical jump than anticipated (hello Pat Connaughton).
These drills do provide some information. Every little thing provides some information in the long run for the team.
What happens in these drills and these games may not be the most important thing in the world, but everything has some value.
The Draft process begins
Really the Draft process has been ongoing for years. Teams review prospects for several years before they even put their name into the NBA Draft. So the Draft process has been ongoing for a while now.
But this is the official beginning of the draft season for fans. Attention for teams not in the Playoffs now can turn fully to the Draft and draft preparation much more seriously. The NBA Draft Lottery is next Tuesday and with the order locked in place, things will begin to pick up steam on the way to the Draft in late June.
It is a demarcation point for the offseason.
The public face for the Magic can officially look toward the 2017 offseason and the 2018 season. Things are going to get going pretty quickly.
As the Magic gather their last bits of information and schedule interviews and workouts, they will be laser-eyed on what comes next for the team. That is the Draft. That is the next step in their re-rebuilt.
Next: Three signs of hope for the Orlando Magic in 2018
That is the Draft. That is the next step in their re-rebuilt. And we are now in the runup to the Draft on June 22.