The Orlando Magic’s founding was something of a miracle.
The city of Orlando was a small town known mostly for its theme parks, its yearly golf tournament and bowl games and its orange groves. It was hardly a bustling metropolis in the center of the state. There were boosters who believed in Orlando’s long-term growth, but it was always a long shot — read Pat Williams’ book Making Magic for the full story (a must-read for all Magic fans).
Fast forward 35 years later, the Magic are a thriving franchise with a deep history. Even though the team has yet to win a championship, they have been an incredibly influential franchise in the league’s history.
This seems like the best place to begin our look at Magic history and our celebration of the 35th anniversary season.
The Orlando Magic have had an eventful 35 years in the NBA. Despite never winning a title, they have played a big role in shaping the league while they have existed.
Orlando has been a key part of the telling of the NBA’s story, whether anyone likes it or not. And certainly, the team will continue to be.
Whether that is being the home for several Hall of Fame players — Shaquille O’Neal, Tracy McGrady and Grant Hill with Vince Carter and Dwight Howard surely to come five years after their retirements. There will certainly be plenty more memories to come.
Even without a banner hanging in the rafters at the Amway Center (there is still some time before 2030, by the way), the Magic have had their fingerprints all over the direction of NBA history.
Whether it was O’Neal’s giant presence in the league, being the last team to defeat Michael Jordan in a playoff series, revolutionizing the league’s relationship with the 3-point line or changing the way the salary cap is managed, the Magic have done a lot that has lasted long beyond the teams on the court.
Orlando may be secondary players in the story of NBA legends — whether that is Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant or LeBron James in the end — but it is impossible not to see the franchise’s fingerprints on the league’s history in the past 35 years.
As we begin to celebrate the Magic’s 35th anniversary, here are five ways the Magic have changed the NBA:
5 ways the Orlando Magic have changed the NBA
The Shooting Revolution
In today’s NBA, shooting is a given. It is perhaps the most essential skill an offense can have. And as offenses around the league become more and more efficient, the three-point shot is a big part of that change.
It was not always this way. For a long time, the 3-point line was a mere oddity. There were specialists for sure. But the league favored brute strength and physicality. They loaded their lineup with energy guys who could rebound and defend the interior rather than fly around the perimeter.
The Orlando Magic clearly understood this when they drafted Shaquille O’Neal in the 1992 NBA Draft. Everyone understood how much of a force O’Neal would be in the league from the moment he arrived — he had one of the absolute best rookie seasons in league history.
If Orlando did not win the lottery that year, they would have taken Alonzo Mourning or Christian Laettner as everyone else did.
But what the Magic did to build around O’Neal became revolutionary.
They had a truly revolutionary 3-point shooter in Dennis Scott already on the roster. He was already shooting more than four 3-pointers per game but O’Neal’s presence really changed things and changed the Magic’s entire strategy.
In the 1992 season (before the Magic drafted O’Neal), Orlando took only 7.2 3-point attempts per game. That is not a typo as that is an impossible number of makes to win in the modern NBA. But that was how things were played.
In O’Neal’s first season in 1993, the Magic averaged 10.8 attempts per game, eighth in the league. In 1994 with the addition of a big point guard in Anfernee Hardaway, the Magic averaged 13.9 3-point attempts per game, second in the league.
When the Magic made their run to the 1995 NBA Finals, the team averaged 17.2 attempts per game and that was just seventh in the league.
Orlando was not alone in this 3-point revolution that was occurring throughout the league. Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers, the constant run-and-gun play of the Denver Nuggets and even Dale Ellis and Sam Perkins on the Seattle Supersonics played a role in increasing 3-point attempts around the league as team tactics slowly changed.
But what was significant about the Orlando Magic of that era — along with the Houston Rockets — was they proved teams could win using this strategy. And win at the highest levels.
Seven of the top 10 teams in 3-point attempts made the playoffs with the eventual champion Rockets leading the way with 21.4 attempts per game (again, amazing how things have changed). Of those teams, three — the Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns and Houston Rockets — all advanced past the first round.
The 3-point revolution had not fully arrived. But it was clear teams could not ignore the weapon any longer. And the way the Magic and Rockets spread the floor — the Magic had Anfernee Hardaway, Nick Anderson and Hakeem Olajuwon around Shaquille O’Neal while the Rockets had Kenny Smith, Sam Cassell and Robert Horry surrounding Hakeem Olajuwon — became the standard for the league moving forward.
5 ways the Orlando Magic have changed the NBA
The Lottery Odds
The NBA has been battling the scourge of tanking for almost its entire history.
They tried to push the last-place teams into a coin flip for the top pick to combat it. Then they created the Lottery system. And thing shave gotten seeming more and more complex as the years have gone on.
A lot of teams probably have the Magic to blame for a lot of different things with the Lottery and the Lottery process.
It was not just that they won the Lottery that changed the franchise and netted them Shaquille O’Neal, it was the luck they got after in winning a second number one pick with virtually zero percent odds to win it.
A number one pick is a franchise-changing moment (one the Magic have gotten now four times with the first three leading the team to the NBA Finals and the fourth preparing for his second season in the league).
One player can truly change the balance of power in the league and the prospects of a team. That is the struggle of a game where there are only five players on the court. One player does indeed make a big difference.
But the Magic somehow going from missing the playoffs on the fourth tiebreaker after O’Neal’s rookie year with one ping pong ball in the hopper and winning a second straight NBA Draft Lottery made the NBA rethink everything.
Sure, the Magic traded Chris Webber for three first-round picks including Anfernee Hardaway. But the league was appropriately upset that the Magic got this stroke of luck despite the remotest of possibilities.
This stroke of luck set up the Magic’s trip to the Finals in 1995 and the first era of successful Magic basketball.
But the league did not take kindly to it. They adjusted the Lottery system to the current 1-14 number draw system they use now. That was done to make it harder for a team like the Magic to win the NBA Draft Lottery again.
They have further adjusted the odds to make it harder for the teams at the bottom to win the Lottery because of the prevalence of tanking. But the biggest change to the NBA Draft Lottery came because of the Magic’s good luck. And they rode that nearly to a title.
5 ways the Orlando Magic have changed the NBA
Playing the Cap
The salary cap has been around in the NBA since the mid-1980s. The various exceptions and changes to it have evolved. But a lot of teams thought about it basically. You sign your own players, make trades and that was that.
Managing the salary cap or using cap space were not a big thing even though free agency had been in the NBA for quite some time (thanks to the efforts of Oscar Robertson and the formation of the NBPA in the 1960s).
What the Magic did though with the salary cap at least on two occasions truly revolutionized the league. John Gabriel was at the forefront of executives who started to use the salary cap in a new way.
How did the Magic acquire Horace Grant and sign him to a then-impressive six-year, $22.3 million contract (the structure of it according to Basketball-Reference was very funky and illegal under the current CBA)? They performed one of the first salary dumps in league history.
The Orlando Magic traded starting point guard Scott Skiles to the Washington Bullets with two future first-round picks (two of the four the Magic received in the Anfernee Hardaway trade) for a future first and future second-round pick.
Other teams protested because it was such a clearly bad deal — the Bulls actually charged the Magic with tampering because Grant made it clear Orlando was his preferred destination.
The Magic dumped their starting guard and two first-round picks for two future picks. But there was nothing illegal about it. And it worked to clear away $2.1 million salary for the 1995 season (the same amount Grant would receive in the first year of his deal).
This was salary cap maneuvering 101, something a lot of teams do now. And adding Grant was a key piece to the Magic’s Finals run in 1995. He was as important as any player the Magic had on the team.
Of course, this was the same kind of creativity the Los Angeles Lakers would eventually use to acquire Shaquille O’Neal, dumping Vlade Divac to the Charlotte Hornets for a high schooler named Kobe Bryant.
This would not be the last time the Magic got creative using the salary cap.
Orlando in rebuilding and tearing apart the 1995 team after the lockout-shortened 1999 season opted for a bold plan of trading away all their players for expiring contracts with the intent of putting together a super team through free agency.
No team had really tried such a bold plan and everyone expected that Magic team to play well at all. The goal was not only to get three big-name free agents but also add a top pick.
Of course, the Heart & Hustle team did not comply. They went 41-41 and nearly made the Playoffs. The Magic still enacted their plan, dumping most of the roster from the famed 2000 season and adding Tracy McGrady and Grant Hill to give the team some major star power (future injuries aside).
Orlando is again using its cap room to stay positioned for future moves. But so much of how the league operates really started with how the Magic manipulated the cap to set up their run in the mid-1990s. They were on the forefront of this and it helped lead to their success.
5 ways the Orlando Magic have changed the NBA
All Kinds of Star Trades
Unfortunately, it is impossible to discuss Orlando Magic history without acknowledging how difficult the team’s separation from its stars has been. Orlando’s history is defined by the way their stars have left and the empty feeling left by a team unable to hold onto its stars or even to end their eras on mutually beneficial terms.
No matter how teams separate from their stars — and it is always inevitable except in exceptionally rare circumstances — it is always painful. And the Magic have frankly experienced it all.
With Shaquille O’Neal, they did not accurately predict the explosion in NBA contracts that came to the league just as he hit free agency in 1996.
O’Neal may have always had eyes on the brighter lights of Los Angeles and the CBA quirk that kept him from entering restricted free agency hurt, but the team gave him every reason to leave by not backing up the Brinks truck. The Orlando Sentinel’s poll did not help matters, but nobody understood the money coming to the NBA at that time.
This time Orlando was left with nothing and losing a player of that caliber was devastating and something the franchise never fully recovered from until the Dwight Howard draft pick reset the franchise.
The Magic as an organization has clearly operated vowing never to repeat this mistake.
With Anfernee Hardaway, injuries had consumed the narrative around the former star. And a frustrated, misunderstanding public blamed Hardaway for his injuries and the franchise’s poor fortune.
It was a bitter breakup that ended as the Magic dumped him to the Phoenix Suns to kickstart their salary-dumping rebuild. At least Orlando got something for him this time, although his value was significantly depressed thanks to his injuries.
Tracy McGrady was the first star Magic player to request a trade. He was frustrated with the team’s inability to surround him with better players and the first-round exits. His disagreement with then-general manager Jon Weisbrod further hurt things and he was determined not to play.
Orlando did not want to commit to a full rebuild despite holding the number one pick and turned Tracy McGrady into an All-Star in Steve Francis along with Cuttino Mobley and Kelvin Cato. That plan was combustible with Francis as the lead and blew up in their faces after they traded Mobley in January.
The Magic again had to make a choice when Dwight Howard requested a trade. Determined not to make the same mistake as with O’Neal, Orlando explored trade opportunities. But as Howard wrestled with his indecision and desire to stay in Orlando, the Magic let time tick by and his value decrease.
They ultimately decided to do a full rebuild. And while they apparently won that trade — Nikola Vucevic eventually became an All-Star — they really did not get anywhere because of poor luck and planning beyond that. Orlando has been a decade hole because of their failure to handle the Howard situation.
And then finally, the Magic sold early on Nikola Vucevic after his second All-Star appearance. This time the reset their franchise with two future first-round picks (that became Franz Wagner and Jett Howard) and Wendell Carter. That has set the Magic up well for this current era with Paolo Banchero at its center.
There is a lesson in there that the Magic can draw on no matter what happens in their future. And few franchises have probably gone through the wild swings this franchise has with trades in 35 seemingly short years.
5 ways the Orlando Magic have changed the NBA
The Stretch-4
It was bold for the Orlando Magic to increase their 3-point attempts to nearly 20 when they had Shaquille O’Neal in the 1990s. But that is the direction the league was going in. And it seemed inevitable as teams look to maximize the centers that they would turn to spacing and shooting.
Still, when Dwight Howard entered the league, everyone still played a very traditional style even as shooting increased.
The Magic started Dwight Howard at power forward next to Kelvin Cato. That is how they viewed Howard early in his career. Even when the Magic evolved into a postseason-capable team, they still wanted to pair Dwight Howard alongside Tony Battie.
A happy accident after Stan Van Gundy took over in 2007 changed everything and perhaps the league.
In a pre-training camp pick-up run, Battie tore his rotator cuff and would miss the start of the season. Stan Van Gundy approached newcomer Rashard Lewis, who signed a max contract with the express desire not to play power forward, about possibly starting alongside Hedo Turkoglu at forward.
Van Gundy might have gotten to this conclusion anyway. The team was trying to play its five best players and it would have been impossible to have one of Lewis or Turkoglu off the bench.
There were a few other teams experimenting with stretch-4s at this time too — the Phoenix Suns notably started Shawn Marion in the Seven Seconds or Less area and Andrei Kirilenko was an early version of the length and versatility of the modern era for the Utah Jazz.
But what Lewis and the Magic accomplished from 2008-10 really did change the league. Much like the 1995 team helped usher in the 3-point revolution, the 2009 Magic helped send it into overdrive. It is one of the most impactful things the Magic have done.
Orlando showed teams with smaller lineups and teams who relied on the 3-point shot could win at elite levels. The Orlando Magic very much forced the Los Angeles Lakers to match their speed in the 2009 Finals — the Lakers were one of the few teams that could match the Magic’s versatility with Lamar Odom and Trevor Ariza at the forward spots.
Lewis was one of the most transformative players in Magic history. And he changed the way the NBA was played forever.