Orlando Magic’s offensive weaknesses mean they will have off nights

The Orlando Magic are still the team we thought they were. An off night offensively like Friday’s preseason finale will be a struggle for the team.

Jonathan Isaac got a rebound and charged up the court with open floor in front of him. It was a thing of beauty to watch him get up the floor with speed. This is exactly what the Orlando Magic imagined when they drafted him. A near 7-foot (sorry 6-foot-12) forward able to take the ball up the floor and attack the basket.

Dennis Neumann on the Magic’s radio broadcast compared Jonathan Isaac’s movement as he attacked the hoop to Giannis Antetokounmpo. It did indeed look like him in many ways. And the Magic would love to see Isaac play like this.

That is the potential for Orlando and everything the team has. The reality is how Isaac finished the play.

He got all the way to the basket and missed the layup short. The San Antonio Spurs defense adjusted and rotated to challenge the long-limbed Isaac. He still probably should have finished the easy lay in. Who is actually going to challenge Isaac?

Davis Bertans grabbed the rebound and was getting ready to outlet it when Evan Fournier delivered Jonathan Isaac a second chance. Evan Fournier stole the ball and fed Jonathan Isaac along the baseline. He drove underneath the basket and tried a reverse layup but missed that short too.

The Magic showed a lot of potential throughout the preseason offensively. The team whipped the ball around quickly and found open shots. They worked inside out and found cutters and slashers to create easier opportunities. They had to find mismatches in transition and take advantage.

Orlando Magic

Those are all things the Magic have to do to find success offensively. Without a primary driver or creator offensively or much shooting to space the floor, the team has to try to manufacture those opportunities and force the defense to rotate and make decisions in other ways.

The preseason prediction that offense would be a problem is still not wrong no matter how well the Magic might have played in the preseason. And Friday’s loss to the Spurs is a reminder that offense will be difficult for this team. And some nights the shots will not fall.

Friday, the Magic started shooting 5 for 23 from the floor. Aaron Gordon missed his first 10 shots in the game and the Magic shot 37.1 percent as a team. Orlando made just 5 of 26 3-pointers. The team had a paltry 80.2 points per 100 possessions.

It was a preseason game and so everything should get taken with a grain of salt. For the entire preseason (for whatever those stats are worth), the Magic had a 99.2 offensive rating and shot a 49.4 percent effective field goal percentage. Five games is an incredibly small sample size and there were at least two offensive stinkers — Monday’s game against the Miami Heat also was a bit of an offensive struggle.

Things will change when the season begins. But for a team that last year ranked 25th in the league scoring 104.7 points per 100 possessions, there is not a lot of offensive optimism. Steve Clifford did not have a great offensive reputation with the Charlotte Hornets (having Kemba Walker helps), but they did finish ninth in the league in offensive rating last year, scoring 108.9 points per 100 possessions.

The reality is that this team is going to be what many expect. There will be moments where the team looks brilliant offensively when Aaron Gordon gets hot and the team has the ball moving. The Magic will look brilliant.

But they will also have games like Friday’s game when the Magic are unable to get even simple shots to fall. As Nikola Vucevic told the Orlando Sentinel after the game, they might get baited into quick shots that look good but are not the ideal shots in the offense and tend to throw the team slightly out of rhythm.

Not helping matters either is Orlando still seems to have difficulty getting to the foul line. Throughout the preseason, they were missing an abnormal amount of free throws anyway.

The Magic are not a team that has a lot of shooters that will demand defense’s attention or respect. And so the paint will remain pretty congested. Orlando has to find ways to manufacture points and scoring opportunities.

The margin for error with this team remains incredibly small.

The Magic have a lot of solid offensive weapons. To win big games against good teams, it will probably take two or three of those four going off reliably to produce a strong offense. On Friday, both Isaac and Gordon struggled. And that simply cannot happen for this team to be successful.

Throughout Friday’s game, Orlando’s defense was pretty solid. The Spurs shot worse than 40 percent for much of the game and ended with an offensive rating worse than 100 points per 100 possessions.

The Magic though probably will not be able to rely wholly on its defense. That should keep them in the game if it lives up to its potential. But then there will be games like Friday’s where the defense does its best to keep the Magic in the game, but the offense does not get over the finish line.

It leaves Orlando with some questions it still has to answer as the game begin to count Wednesday in the regular season. They are questions the Magic expected to have to answer.

The offense has potential. But it is going to have its struggles too. And the biggest question is how the Magic respond when things get tough offensively.

That answer is not yet clear.