What we learned from Orlando Magic Madness 2020

We celebrated Orlando Magic history with our #MagicMadness tournament. It has forced us to reconsider some key parts of Magic history.

To help us pass the time during the season’s hiatus, I decided to hold an impromptu fan vote of the best players in Orlando Magic history. Taking off the since-canceled NCAA Tournament, I bracketed everyone in that style, splitting everyone by regions.

This was completely unscientific. I opened polling on Twitter for 24 hours with the simple question “Who ya got?” I was not looking for any specific criteria. This is completely unscientific. The only opinion injected into it was my decisions on where I seeded players (there was some thought given to this, but not a ton of statistical analysis).

This was meant to give a rough picture of the best players in Magic history. But mostly it was meant to be fun.

We all know who the top four players in Magic history are — although, I rigged it so the final four would not involve those four players. We know there is a second tier of players just below them. The debates are usually among those players and within these tiers.

Ultimately Shaquille O’Neal was the winner, defeating Tracy McGrady in the final Dwight Howard‘s unpopularity was not enough to keep him out of the Final Four. And there were a lot of blowouts and easy decisions after we got past the first and second round.

While this was an unscientific examination of Magic history, it was still very interesting to see how things developed and how fans voted. It was at least a small examination of how fans view their team’s history.

Again, this is not a scientific ranking of Magic players — I will provide a rough ranking of the 64 players coming up at the end of this post. But it did reveal some interesting new debate lines for the Magic and their history.

Some of the things that I learned about Magic history and how we view Magic history after the completion of this mini-project follows.