The Orlando Magic are the team we thought they were

The Orlando Magic raised expectations with their play. But as the pressure in the season has increased, they may just be the team we thought anyway.

It is easy to look at any team on paper at the beginning of the season and try to predict what will happen during the course of the season. There are always surprises and the way a team plays can have a way to shift and change expectations.

At some point, those predictions and those expectations get revisited. Everything gets judged to that original point in some way. There was always a reason those expectations were set to begin with. There were original goals to accomplish that those early expectations envision.

But an 82-game schedule is a winding maze. There are moments where it feels like the team is going in the right direction only to hit a rut and a dead end. Then it will find itself again and get itself going.

Going back and remembering those expectations can display a lot.

But there may be one truth that comes from it. That is the truth of who this team really is.

No one had much expectation for the Orlando Magic this season. There was no talk of Playoffs. There was no sense of what this team could accomplish. It was mostly the same group that won just 25 games last year. With some health, maybe they could eclipse 30.

That is hardly enough to make the Playoffs even in the Eastern Conference. It still felt like a reorganizing and evaluation season. The Magic were still only the outlines of what they might become.

Things change quickly though.

The Eastern Conference was worse than everyone expected. Orlando strung together a few wins and the team found itself in the Playoff race. They could begin to believe and confidence was starting to flow as the Magic showed improvement on defense and seemed to play better than those expectations.

It seemed Orlando had something to play for. They still do, even as those chances fade.

But the NBA is about consistency. It is about what a team can do even at its lowest moment to give itself a chance to win. The Magic are still trying to find that consistency, even at this juncture of the season.

And that became clearer and clearer as the season went on.

Orlando found itself unable to hold onto big leads. Despite some positive early results, the team looked shaky under pressure closing out games.

Both those inconsistencies appeared in the Orlando Magic’s 103-98 loss to the Houston Rockets. The Magic continued their trend of playing strong offense and taking a lead only to give their opponent a small window to break through.

The Magic have made a habit of playing maybe 36-42 minutes of winning basketball only to see themselves unravel in one six-minute stretch. Here it was the fourth quarter where James Harden‘s overall brilliance was simply too much to stop.

Orlando had the game tied after controlling the entire game. But with the Rockets breathing down their neck and Harden applying all the pressure, the Magic crumbled. Forget Harden’s heroics, he calmly stepped up and hit the shots he always makes. Orlando was left scrambling.

In the final two minutes, the Magic had a turnover, had a missed 3-pointer, had Nikola Vucevic tap an offensive rebound to the backcourt for another turnover. In an 8-0 run the Rockets were flawless forcing the Magic into mistake after mistake.

Trying to work a matchup advantage as the team tried to get the ball to Nikola Vucevic against smaller defenders. He struggled to take advantage. He had four turnovers as he struggled to read where the double teams were coming from to force the ball from him.

These late-game struggles may very well be the signs of a team that lacks the killer instinct, maybe even the talent to win in the end. Something is missing. It was something everyone always knew was missing in some way.

That is to say, these are all conclusions many long-time Magic observers may have made before the season even began.

The Magic lacked a consistent go-to offensive option, never had been a stellar defensive team and did not have a ton of depth. The Magic did little to resolve any of those issues in the summer.

The team raised some expectations with their play through the early part of the season. And they should. A team should change its expectations as it sees what it can do and what something looks like on paper becomes reality.

But there always remains a reason the team had those lowered expectations to begin with. No matter how much the Magic seemed to raise those beliefs, they seemed to revert back to their old habits and those old expectations.

The same questions remained. Could Orlando win with the same group that had lost so much for so long? Could this team delay the change that felt so inevitable?

This season is both playing out exactly how everyone expected it might and a huge disappointment for that reason. The Magic have shown exactly what they can do and how good they can be. But they have not been able to do it consistently. They have not been able to string together the wins they need to reach that potential.

Evan Fournier said it best a few weeks ago. The players are not ignorant. They know this is it for this group. They have to win and prove this franchise can move in a better direction together or else the Magic will have to make the changes everyone believed was necessary before this season began.

The team still has a chance, just four games out. But they are as close to the Playoff race as they are the tanking teams. And a decision day is drawing near with the trade deadline less than two weeks away.

The thing this season has proven is that those changes may be necessary anyway. That is what a lot of people believed before the season. That was probably always the case.

Try as this team might, its ceiling as a group is not much higher than the eighth seed in a watered-down East.

That conclusion never really changed. Maybe this stretch where the Magic have started to fall off the pace and shown their flaws as the pressure has ramped up. They were all the flaws that were always there.

This team aspired to be more. But they may just be what everyone thought they would be anyway.