The Orlando Magic have been sitting and waiting for the last month. The NBA Playoffs, as expected, have gone on without them leaving the Magic’s young players to text each other and merely dream about the potential of playing in the postseason.
Their time may very well come in a year. Although nobody would expect this team to be making the leap to be playing this deep into the Playoffs any time soon. But they are on their way.
And shortly after the Finals end, the offseason begins. Everyone starts over and begins the building to the next season.
All of that is hanging around as the Orlando Magic watch this year’s series between the Miami Heat and the Denver Nuggets. They are preparing for a critical offseason for their team and their own title hopes.
The NBA Finals begin tonight and the Orlando Magic have a lot to watch as the Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat do battle for the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Every playoff series is a lesson of course. Even though the Magic are not playing and merely watching this year, there are plenty of storylines that the Magic will follow. Obviously beyond who wins the whole series.
Whether it is thinking about which free agents with championship experience to target, the former players who will get their chance to play for a title or the way these two teams made it, the Finals will give the Magic some instruction for how they should build and what works in the NBA these days.
Everyone is watching the Finals. And while draft prep will continue, this is the ultimate end to the story of this season. Everyone is eager to see how it all turns out.
That is the only thing left to do this season. All the focus is on the court to see who ultimately lifts the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
With the NBA Finals set to begin tonight in Denver. Here are the Magic-related storylines to watch as the NBA’s champion is decided on the court.
5 Orlando Magic storylines to watch in the 2023 NBA Finals
The Aaron Gordon Story
The Orlando Magic of course had a direct hand in making the Denver Nuggets what they are today.
The trade of Aaron Gordon (and Gary Clark, NEVER FORGET GARY CLARK) to the Nuggets for Gary Harris, R.J. Hampton and that coveted 2025 first-round pick was a move that took the Nuggets from a very good team to a potential championship team.
Gordon stepped in immediately in that 2021 season and turned the Nuggets into even more of an offensive juggernaut while giving them the switching wing defender that they missed when Jerami Grant left the team in free agency following their Western Conference Finals run in the 2020 Bubble.
They knew they needed a player like Gordon and went out and got him.
Of course, their ascendance to true title contenders got derailed. Jamal Murray’s ACL injury just 10 games after Aaron Gordon’s arrival slowed any of that positive momentum down. And it has taken this long for Murray to get all the way back.
Gordon has fit in perfectly with that team. This year has been one of his best seasons and probably his most efficient season.
Gordon averaged 16.3 points per game and 6.6 rebounds per game with shooting splits of 56.4/34.7/60.8. That does not look great but his 60.8 percent effective field goal percentage is a career-best.
For Magic fans, Gordon seems to have found the role that best fits all of his talents and will help him succeed.
He will still sometimes give into those star instincts he gained from Orlando, but he most fits in as a slasher catching passes from Nikola Jokic or crashing the glass. His main efforts are on defense where he will likely get the main matchup with Jimmy Butler for this series.
Gordon is central to everything the Nuggets do. He may not be their top scorer, but he plays a vital role that has helped transform the Nuggets into a championship team.
He obviously was not everything the Magic imagined when they picked him with the fourth pick in the 2014 NBA Draft. The Magic tried to groom him into their star and he was not up to the task — even after several early years wasted trying to figure out which role was best for him and swapping coaches seemingly every year.
Why Gordon did not work out perfectly in Orlando is a mixture of both the team’s poor development culture and Gordon’s lack of focus in the player he wanted to become — not to mention some bad-luck injuries early in his career.
But Aaron Gordon is here now. And he — along with Jeff Green and Ish Smith for the Nuggets and Victor Oladipo for the Heat (Oladipo will not play after suffering an injury) — are the Magic alums who have a shot at winning a title.
5 Orlando Magic storylines to watch in the 2023 NBA Finals
Lessons in Team Building
On the other side of that Aaron Gordon trade was Gary Harris.
For him, the trade was something of a shock and something of a fall. He was leaving a team that he had helped build into a winner and played a key role from the very beginning to go to a team that was just starting over.
As Harris met the Orlando media for the first time, he said all the right things of course. But he noted that he had the experience of being right in these shoes before. He was a player on a team without much recent history who watched the team grow into a title contender.
For a Magic team that needed some on-court and locker-room experience on this big rebuilding project they were undertaking, Harris’ insight and experience would be critical for a young team. The fact he has chosen to stay and help this thing continue to grow is at least some endorsement of what is getting started in Orlando.
But that is also the bigger point. Things are just getting started in Orlando. And this team wants to build the same kind of sustained success that both the Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat have built.
This trip to the Finals is not merely a journey about this year. They did not get here just because of what happened this season. This has been a multi-year journey of team building and culture to reach this point. It has been the culmination of a long journey.
There were plenty of times when both the Nuggets and Heat could have abandoned what they were building. Instead, they stayed the course and stayed true to their journey and the culture they were building.
They believed in the teams and ideas they had and did not let momentary setbacks slow them down.
Indeed, this journey was one that was built over many years.
Several Nuggets players and coaches have pointed to their loss in the final game of the regular season to Jimmy Butler and Minnesota Timberwolves in the 2018 season as a galvanizing point for this run through the playoffs over several seasons.
The Heat have had plenty of times to turn back too. They have seemingly gone up and down going from the Finals in the 2020 bubble to out in the first round to the top seed in the East to barely making it into the playoffs through the Play-In Tournament.
What has mattered to these teams is the continuity in what they have built. They have spent years to get to this moment and built their identity through years of repetition, adding role players that fit their stars and fit their culture rather than force-fitting players into that group.
There has been a clear declaration of purpose in the way they have built. And that is what every team is striving for.
5 Orlando Magic storylines to watch in the 2023 NBA Finals
3-Point Volume
The obsession for the Orlando Magic, as they plan the next steps in their development, has focused on shooting as an all-important skill. Orlando desperately needs to improve its shooting as both a low-percentage team (34.6 percent, 24th in the league) and a low-volume team (31.1 per game, 27th in the league).
That just is not a combination that is going to lead to a lot of wins in the modern NBA.
The NBA Finals, and Playoffs at large, point the league in the direction it is going. The 2009 Magic proved to the league 3-point shooting could win just as they proved the stretch-4 was here to stay — especially with how Lamar Odom and Trevor Ariza played in that series.
What will we learn about the league and its direction this time around?
At its very heart, this will be a battle between two teams with different philosophies on how to use the 3-pointer.
The Miami Heat surround their roster with players who can shoot from the outside. In the regular season, they were 10th in the league with 34.4 3-point attempts per game but 27th in the league in percentage at 34.4 percent (worse than the Magic!).
Even though the Heat had an uncharacteristically poor 3-point shooting season, everyone recognized the shooting potential they had with Max Strus, Duncan Robinson, Gabe Vincent and Caleb Martin as potential 3-point specialists.
In the playoffs, of course, that has completely flipped. The Heat are 10th with 33.6 attempts per game but first in percentage at 39.0 percent.
The Heat are a team that believes in taking their share of 3-pointers. And they are going to take a lot of them.
The Nuggets are almost the exact opposite. Denver finished the regular season at 25th in the league in attempts at 31.2 attempts per game. But the Nuggets made 37.9 percent of their threes (fourth in the league).
The plain message is simple, you can be a low-volume 3-point shooting team but you better make the ones you take. And that is where the Magic certainly struggle right now. They have to find a way to make more of the threes they take.
Orlando is almost certainly going to run a similar motion-style offense in the end to what Miami and Denver run. We may see more of those types of team-based offenses proliferate around the league — especially with CBA concerns now likely limiting the formation of teams with mega contracts on them.
What should be important as the Magic seek to improve is that they just need to make more threes. Both the Nuggets and Heat prove how important that aspect of the game is.
5 Orlando Magic storylines to watch in the 2023 NBA Finals
Free Agents to Target
Of course, not everything is about the Finals as it stands now. The Orlando Magic are already deep into draft prep and are surely also thinking about what they will try to accomplish in free agency.
The Magic are once again one of the few teams with cap space to spend this offseason — coming in at somewhere around $23-25 million in room. Orlando certainly has to add to the roster to continue improving on their 34-2in season from last year. Depth should be a primary concern.
But Orlando is still not expected to be major players. Despite the persistent rumors about the team chasing Fred VanVleet, it is not likely the Magic work to clear the cap room to get to the $30 million per year he will surely command.
And Orlando is expected to follow the track that both finalists took and focus on building their core with consistency and stability while adding role players around them.
That seems to be the direction the team wants to go as it entrusts Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner more and more to control the team. Adding on top of this, the Magic likely want to see how their own young players like Markelle Fultz, Wendell Carter, Cole Anthony and Jalen Suggs do in expanded roles.
Still, there are more than a few free agents on these championship-contending teams that the Magic and the rest of the league are eyeing carefully. Nobody ever stays completely together after a championship season. There will be a lot of vying for that title experience and shine.
The first to talk about is Denver Nuggets guard Bruce Brown.
Brown has a player option for next year worth $6.8 million. He is likely to decline that and put the Nuggets in a very tricky situation.
They are expected to be a tax team next season. And because Brown has been with the team for only one year, the Nuggets will be limited in offering him a contract worth around $8.4 million. That makes him ripe to move teams. The Nuggets simply will not be able to match under the rules.
Brown has been a critical piece to the Nuggets’ postseason run. He averaged a career-high 11.5 points per game and 3.4 assists per game with shooting splits of 48.3/35.8/75.8. In the playoffs, he has upped his averages to 12.2 points per game and 2.2 assists per game with shooting splits of 53.1/28.9/89.5.
Brown is a capable defender and slasher to the basket who can hit from the outside. He is maybe not the shooter the Magic are looking for — and while he had productive seasons in previous stops, nobody can deny there is a bit of a Nikola Jokic bump happening. But Brown fits in well with a team that have some players who create some gravity.
The other free agents to watch are Miami Heat forward Max Strus and guard Gabe Vincent.
Strus is coming off graduating from a two-way contract to a minimum deal. The Heat though do retain his Bird Rights. So it is not clear what it would take to pry him free.
Strus averaged 11.5 points per game while shooting 35.0 percent on 7.0 3-point attempts per game. He is averaging 10.3 points per game and shooting 35.9 percent on 5.9 3-point attempts per game.
Vincent is under a similar minimum deal and the Heat will also have his Bird Rights. Like Strus, he is a bit undersized but plays hard on defense and hits from the outside.
Vincent averaged 9.4 points per game and shot 33.4 percent from beyond the arc this season.
None of these players may be perfect fits for what the Magic need or are looking for. But it would not be surprising to see the Magic try to get in on any of these players to supplement their roster.
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.