Orlando Magic are in position to make the biggest moves this offseason

Despite what the lack of national media attention might have you believe, the Orlando Magic are one of the up-and-coming teams in the league today.

The core of Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner, Markelle Fultz and Wendell Carter is a good place to start. And coach Jamahl Mosley has grown with this group over two seasons.

The front office has also provided stability and drafted well, and the organization has all of its own lottery picks and a healthy cap sheet for the coming years.

The team is set up for the future and can go down many different paths to continue building and rebuilding.

This all sounds great on paper. But the Orlando Magic are on the precipice of taking the next big step. That could be going into the market for the next big star that comes on the market.

There are already several names that could hit the market. And the playoffs will go a long way to sorting out which teams decide to rebuild and restart and which teams try to push forward with what they have. The Magic are looming in the background as an up-and-coming team needing that last piece and having all the cap room and resources to make a deal happen.

The latest player to come across the timeline then is the visibly frustrated Luka Doncic. Considering Doncic’s connections with Mosley, it has not taken Magic fans long to try to connect some dots and wonder if the Magic would be a team that could make move if Doncic wants out.

An outrageous question to throw out there, but let’s do our best to try and find out how likely something like this would be.

Obviously, the team losing the superstar, the Dallas Mavericks in this instance if we use Doncic as the example, would have to be in a really bad place to consider letting him go.

There are only about 10 players in the league who you can realistically expect to win a championship with each year, and Doncic absolutely falls into this category.

But the trade that the Mavericks made for Kyrie Irving to try and help Luka Doncic has not worked so far.

The Mavericks are 3-7 in their last 10 games and actually sit outside even the Play-in tournament since trading for Irving. In other words, they’re somehow in a similar position to the Magic right now.

Worryingly for the Mavericks, Doncic is now becoming vocal about his current situation.

Teams who trade away a superstar rarely get fairly compensated when the player tries to engineer a move out of town.

The New Orleans Pelicans got a king’s bounty for Anthony Davis, and the Utah Jazz may have performed the greatest trade of all time in moving Rudy Gobert for far more than he was worth.

But if the Mavericks entered this dangerous game, they could at least take solace from the fact the Magic would be able to give them a whole lot of assets to make a deal work.

Three lottery picks, two pick swaps, and some combination of Markelle Fultz, Jalen Suggs, Cole Anthony, Wendell Carter and even Jonathan Isaac would be the starting point.

The Magic have options if this is the kind of deal they want to pursue. Orlando will be a player in the next superstar trade auction, provided that star player sees the potential and wants to join Orlando.

As important as Fultz and Carter are to what the Magic are building right now, any player not named Banchero or Wagner should be available if Doncic is on the table.

There would be a lot to work out there, but equally as important would be ensuring Doncic would actually want to stay in Orlando beyond the length of his current deal.

Doncic has a player option on his contract in 2026,  so the Magic would have at least three years from this summer to try and convince him to stay.

The length of the contract (it actually runs to the end of 2027 and Doncic would be crazy not to opt-in to more than $48 million in that final year), would constitute more than a rental as well.

The question then becomes, how much interest would Doncic have for playing in Florida?

There is maybe a little bit more working in favor of the Magic here than many fans would have you believe.

The first is that the Magic have only ever been a notable destination when the team has been good. Well, the team looks like it is going to become very good, and soon.

Once that happens, they have proven they can attract high-level talent in the past.

Doncic would vault the Magic to contender status right away, and he would be playing in a state where there are extremely favorable income tax laws (although the same is true of Texas).

Secondly, and we will do our best not to overstate this, but Doncic has a relationship with Mosley dating back to his time as an assistant with the Mavericks.

Doncic likely has strong relationships with individuals throughout the league. But this is still something the Magic can point to if they want to keep Doncic happy.

Finally, and it appears to go under the radar all of the time, but European players are built differently than their American counterparts when it comes to the cities they play in. They have historically not had the roster-jumping tendencies of their American superstar counterparts.

Giannis Antetokounmpo plays in one of the smallest markets in the NBA in the Milwaukee Bucks. And he chose to stay there despite a lot of outside noise that seemed ready to push him out before the Bucks broke through for a title in 2021. That never really seemed like an option for him.

Seriously, read Mirin Fader’s excellent book on Antetokounmpo to get a feel for how desolate that place was when Antetokounmpo arrived.

Antetokounmpo has never given any indication he fancies moving to the bright lights of Los Angeles or New York, even after delivering a championship to Milwaukee.

Nikola Jokic, the two-time defending league MVP, plays for the Denver Nuggets. Not exactly a marquee destination for superstars to want to go and play.

Dirk Nowitzki never left the Mavericks, and any European star in the league right now that you can think of has never asked to be traded, and has gone to wherever they were sent to play.

Location does not matter as much to Doncic as fans would have you believe. He just wants to win, and the Magic represent a real chance to do that for the next half-decade at least.

In answer to this question then, the Mavericks would be crazy to trade Luka Doncic. But there are many factors why, if they decided to do so, the Magic would be well placed to land him in a deal.