5 Orlando Magic storylines to watch in the 2023 NBA Finals

5 Orlando Magic storylines to watch in the 2023 NBA Finals

Final Prediction

As nice as all those side stories are and as much as we might stretch to try to make a connection to the Orlando Magic and how they are building, this series is still about the basketball. It is still about what happened on the court.

And more than any other point in the season, this is about what happens on the court. And that is just frankly something everyone should simply enjoy without any complications.

This series should be an interesting one, to say the least. It is a battle between two teams with excellent coaching and a clear sense of their identity and purpose.

The Miami Heat play with extreme confidence in what they do. They may not be able to out-talent teams, but they pounce on every mistake and they are relentless with their effort. That is always half the battle.

But this challenge with the Denver Nuggets is going to be very different than what they have seen to this point in the Eastern Conference. The Nuggets are not a team built on individual brilliance — as brilliant as Nikola Jokic is. They do not run a ton of isolations and there is no one player they can load up defensively on and force into mistakes.

Jokic is great because he is not often looking to create for himself. He is a pivot in which everything revolves around for this team. And so the Heat will not be able to load up on him.

Instead, what the Heat will need to do is find a way to slow down Jamal Murray and get the ball out of his hands.

The biggest key to this series is going to be turnovers. The Heat pounced on turnovers throughout the Eastern Conference Finals. They use their switching and pressure defense to crowd ball handlers and push them off their spots.

The Nuggets are not a team that makes a ton of mistakes. They rank first in the playoffs with an 11.7 percent turnover rate although they ranked 23rd in the regular season at 14.7 percent.

This is the terms of the battle.

The Nuggets though are playing so well. This should be a competitive series and the Heat are not going to go down without a fight. But Denver is playing at such a high level, it is hard to see them falling in this series.

Nuggets in 5.