5 worst starters of the Orlando Magic’s Shaquille O’Neal era

There may still be a debate about who the best player in Orlando Magic history is, but there is no debate that Shaquille O’Neal is the most important player in Magic history to date.

The heights O’Neal took the Magic to and the time that he came to Orlando as the franchise’s first true superstar cannot really accurately be described. O’Neal was the kind of player who immediately made the Magic a playoff team, only losing out on a playoff spot in his rookie year on the third tiebreaker.

The Magic were in the NBA Finals by his third year in the league — acquiring Anfernee Hardaway on a draft night trade helped a bit — and the team seemed to have an extremely bright future ahead of them.

That is how the story ends. Or at least that is how Magic fans want it to end.

What went wrong with that caused them to lose Shaquille O’Neal?

The Orlando Magic were a fast-burning star when Shaquille O’Neal arrived. They did very little wrong until it blew up in their faces at the end. But they struggled for a while to complete their lineup.

It was not so much what happened on the court. The Magic built a championship-contending team and surely would have continued competing for a title if O’Neal had stayed in Orlando. It took O’Neal four seasons to win his first title with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Certainly losing in a sweep in the 1996 Eastern Conference Finals would cause any team to question itself. But that was also because of injuries as much as anything — Horace Grant, Nick Anderson and Brian Shaw all got hurt in that finals series — and that loss was to a 72-win Chicago Bulls team.

The Magic never got a chance to reload and try again to take down the Bulls. Instead, they did not properly measure the change in contract values that hit the league hard in the summer of 1996 and mismanaged their public play to get O’Neal to stay (that is an understatement).

Or maybe O’Neal was always looking for his way out of Orlando and always had eyes on Los Angeles. Only the principal players know the true story.

At least in building their team, the Magic seemed to do everything they could to put O’Neal in a position to win a title in Orlando. The Magic just needed to get over the hump and do it. O’Neal’s early departure only makes the loss in the 1995 Finals more painful.

There were not many mistakes in O’Neal’s four seasons in Orlando. Still, the Magic did not win a title. So something was not perfectly in tune. And there were maybe a few starters who did not fit what the Magic needed.

It is hard to describe the O’Neal era in terms of its shortcomings because this was a team that shined bright, even if it was fast.