How real was the Orlando Magic’s start?
The burning question for most in the Orlando Magic front office is probably trying to figure out how real the start of the season was. The team had the best record in the NBA more than 10 games in — so did the Memphis Grizzlies, but still — and was rolling.
The Magic were 8-4 as they started a West Coast road trip. Everyone expected them to fall back to earth, but not completely out of the Playoff race. Things looked very good for the Magic in that first quarter of the season.
Of course on that November evening, the bottom started to fall out.
Jonathan Isaac rolled his ankle and would hardly play the rest of the season, dealing with various foot issues and a team willing to wait him out and bring him along slowly. Terrence Ross went out for virtually the rest of the season a few weeks later with a fracture to his tibial plateau.
Nikola Vucevic missed significant time with a broken hand starting in December. Aaron Gordon suffered a concussion in December and then another in January. There were so many players in and out of the lineup. Orlando was simply unable to establish a consistent lineup.
The Magic’s players pointed to this as at least one reason why things went so far off the rails. They could not establish the consistency they needed.
Still, those first 12 games were a little unreal. The Magic were eighth in offensive rating (107.0 points per 100 possessions), seventh in defensive rating (101.4 points allowed per 100 possessions) and fourth in effective field goal percentage (54.7 percent). None of that seemed nor was sustainable. But the team looked completely different.
They had a completely different confidence about them as they played.
Oftentimes, NBA players like to say you are not as good as you are on your best day nor as bad as you are on your worst day. It is a way to keep an even keel throughout the long course of a season. If the Magic had not suffered their injuries, they were clearly waning. They were no longer playing like the world beaters of the first quarter of the season. But they were certainly better than they played after that Isaac injury.
Maybe they would have settled into the Playoff race and had a chance at a lower seed without the massive rash of injuries.
What was clear though is, while the team might have had the talent to be better than their record indicated, they did not have the resolve to stop the bleeding and stay in the race. They allowed things to get as bad as they did.
That certainly revealed a lot to Jeff Weltman.