Orlando Magic’s future still relies on their young core

The Orlando Magic made the playoffs last year and doubled down on their team. Taking the next step will depend on whether their young players step up.

The Orlando Magic generated plenty of excitement this offseason in retaining Nikola Vucevic and Terrence Ross. These were two key players in the team’s return to the playoffs for the first time in seven years.

Orlando did not change much from their roster — read: anything at all.

In a summer that saw tremendous change throughout the league, the Magic determined the best way for them to keep their spot in the playoffs and continue their growth was to run things back with the same roster.

The team would still have Nikola Vucevic to anchor the offense as the fulcrum in the high and low post. He is the consistent scorer and rebounder whom the team had successfully covered on defense — thank in part to Vucevic’s renewed defensive focus and effort.

The team would still have Terrence Ross coming off the bench, a flamethrower who can get hot in a hurry and make difficult shots over good defense. He was vital to the team getting the energy and spark to make their playoff push.

Evan Fournier is expected to bounce back after a poor shooting season. While he expanded his playmaking and defensive aspect of his game, his struggles to shoot held the team’s offense back on several occasions. Evan Fournier, a career 37.1 percent 3-point shooter, hit on just 34.0 percent from the arc last year.

These are all players the Magic can rely on. They are all in the prime of their careers and probably near the maximum of their output. Orlando will rely on them for consistent production to get back to the playoffs.

And to be clear, that is the goal in all of this first and foremost. At a baseline, Orlando hopes to be able to repeat last year’s results.

But that is not the end game.

As the Magic committed salary and payroll to last year’s team, there was considerable hand-wringing about whether the Magic were overcommitting to a team that would simply make a playoff cameo and then exit. The team was doubling down on last year’s team with the assumption the team would get better.

Orlando is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The team wants to make the playoffs and win now and have made signings to do so.

But the only way for the Magic to take that next step and get to 50 wins or the second round relies solely on the team’s young players.

The Magic had one of the youngest starting lineups in the NBA Playoffs. The team is still incredibly young with 23-year-old Aaron Gordon, 21-year-old Jonathan Isaac, 24-year-old Wesley Iwundu and 21-year-old Mohamed Bamba all playing critical roles throughout the season. That is not to mention 21-year-old Markelle Fultz waiting in the wings working to get healthy and back on the court.

The team has a lot of young players they are pinning their hopes on. And ultimately whether the team takes the next step relies on their shoulders.

Ultimately, the Magic must hope that they will grow and outperform some of the older players on the roster and create a solid foundation for the team to compete for something more than just a playoff appearance.

If the goal is to win a championship, Orlando certainly still lacks a top-10 player to take that next step at the moment. But the team stil has a lot of young players that show promise.

Predicting that promise is proving difficult.

It is true the Magic have a lot of interesting young players who can still get significantly better. But the boom-or-bust nature of some of these players — particularly Markelle Fultz and Mohamed Bamba — makes it hard to predict the Magic’s future.

Using FiveThirtyEight’s CARMELO projection system and WAR figures, Zach Kram of The Ringer attempted to rank the young cores in the league. Essentially, he was trying to determine the potential wins above replacement values for the next five seasons from players who are 25 years or younger by the midpoint of the 2020 season.

In some way, this kind of measure gives a current overview of which teams might be on the rise. Players just before hitting their prime are certainly capable of the most growth and so these teams make up a big part of the league’s future. Especially if they are performing well at an early stage in their careers.

The Magic are certainly among that group.

While most power rankings and projections of the early season have the Magic in the teens or just barely slipping into the playoffs, these rankings present a rosier picture for the team.

Kram’s numbers rank the Magic 11th in the league in terms of young cores. Notably that is fourth among Eastern Conference teams — trailing the Philadelphia 76ers, Boston Celtics and Atlanta Hawks.

In the 76ers and Celtics’ case, those are teams that have already started winning with extremely young players. They are certainly set up to dominate the conference for several more years. The Hawks have collected a lot of interesting young players and the league is intrigued with their development.

But it certainly suggests the Magic will remain in the playoff picture for the near future.

The Magic, however, are a team that features a lot of variability.

Aaron Gordon is rated as the best young player — CARMELO compares him to Tobias Harris and Jamaal Wilkes with an increase in WAR this year but still a wide range of potential outcomes for his career. If you clicked on that link, you will see Gordon has the potential to become an All-Star, but also the potential to be a non-factor still.

Gordon has had such an up-and-down career and finally seems to have things on track. But these projection systems are not going to know how to project what he can become.

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The same could be said for Jonathan Isaac — their projections for him are a bit more bullish — who simply has not played very much. Trying to project little-used players like Bamba or Fultz is also extremely difficult.

CARMELO is pretty optimistic about Fultz still, but has his likely outcome at the bottom part of his range. And it is not as optimistic about Bamba, seeing him as more of a defensive specialist rather than a high-level starter.

Kram notes this difficulty with The Ringer:

"Most players discussed in this exercise are unproven, with large error bars in their future projections. But the Magic seem to take that uncertainty to another level. Beyond Gordon, young Orlando players include Jonathan Isaac, Markelle Fultz, injured 2019 first-rounder Chuma Okeke, and Mo Bamba—all of whom could conceivably develop into starters on a playoff team or flunk out of the league within a few years."

That is part of the big uncertainty with the Magic. No one knows what even Gordon, a five-year player, will become. Could he still make that star turn? What is his ultimate ceiling?

Isaac is a bigger mystery. The range of his potential outcomes for this coming season seems endless after he found his footing late last year.

And Fultz and Bamba are still so new to the league with so much untapped potential, it is even hard to figure out what the Magic can rely on them for next season.

But this is all the bigger point. How these four players develop — and to some extent Wesley Iwundu and Chuma Okeke — will determine how far this Magic team can go.

Players like Vucevic, Ross and Fournier are there for the present to give the team a solid base to continue winning while these players develop. But ultimately, the Magic’s future rests upon this group of players — Gordon and Isaac specifically in 2020 and those two plus Bamba and Fultz beyond that.

Nobody wants to settle for sneaking into the playoffs. And getting to that next level depends on whether this young group performs up to or exceed expectations.