5 big takeaways from the Orlando Magic’s preseason

Orlando Magic: 5 takeaways from the preseason

Experimenting continues

The Orlando Magic have a lot of young players who are still figuring out their place in the league. The team has long extolled its versatility and its ability to mix and match lineups as needed, professing that a lot of players were truly positionless.

Under Steve Clifford, though, the Magic largely held to a tight structure.

Steve Clifford said it pretty clearly himself that he was hesitant to play Khem Birch and Nikola Vucevic together (only doing so because of his affinity for Birch and injuries at power forward to the roster). He said he wanted to keep Chuma Okeke at the 4 for most of his rookie year to try to simplify his role.

That inevitably had effects throughout the roster. The team ended up playing a lot of Dwayne Bacon and the Magic looked pretty vanilla just so they could keep a traditiona lineup.

There is something to that structure. The team needed it and that stability and expectation helped the Magic make the playoffs.

But that is not this team. That is really not this NBA.

Frustratingly, the Magic never tried lineups with Jonathan Isaac and Aaron Gordon playing the 4 and 5. The team never went super small. It was never a full embrace of the team’s versatility.

There is no guarantee that Jamahl Mosley will go that route. But he is willing to try things that seemed pretty difficult to imagine the previous coaching staff trying and is trying to modernize the team and its lineup and rotation decisions.

Playing Mohamed Bamba alongside Wendell Carter might have gotten some eye rolls and skepticism under a Steve Clifford regime — indeed fans hated the Nikola Vucevic/Khem Brich pairing with a passion. But that group actually worked well together. They defended well and they both showed an ability to spread the floor.

That is really a credit to the improvement that both Carter and Bamba put in this offseason. They both got dramatically better in the preseason and that has created more flexibility with the lineups the Magic want to play.

It is always a challenge to play your five best players. That is the heart of the positionless modern NBA. But the Magic seemingly have a lot of options to sort through.

The one lineup we did not see much in the preseason was a three-guard lineup with Jalen Suggs, Cole Anthony and R.J. Hampton. That might be one the team is avoiding until Markelle Fultz is back so the team can have some depth after playing those three guys together — the Magic’s two-center lineup works because Robin Lopez is on the roster.

Mosley is going to settle on a consistent rotation. The team is not going to be constantly changing and shifting things. There is merit in consistency.

But it is also clear Mosley is not going to b stuck to convention. He is going to try different things — look at his aggressive 2-3 zone against the Boston Celtics on Wednesday.

This is indeed a different kind of mindset for the team. But everyone is going to have to wait to see how this firmly and finally shakes out when the regular season begins.