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.
5 worst starters of Orlando Magic’s Shaquille O’Neal era
Tom Tolbert (1993)
61 starts, 8.1 PPG, 5.7 RPG
There will be a theme in the way these starters all come down. If the theme of Dwight Howard’s tenure with the Orlando Magic was about trying to find an adequate shooting guard with four positions seemingly set, then Shaquille O’Neal’s tenure was defined by trying to find the right power forward to run with him.
They eventually did that by signing Horace Grant as a free agent in 1994. The Magic reached the Finals in 1995. Grant is one of the best power forwards in the team’s history for the impact he had on the team in making them title contenders.
It is hard to think about how important that role is today with how much the position has changed. But in the early- and mid-1990s, enforcers were still an important role. With the physical play and so many elite centers, they needed a physical presence to take some of the pounding defensively, dish it out when called for and spread the floor some with a mid-range jumper.
Shaquille O’Neal’s first power forward was a grinder in the league for a long time in Tom Tolbert. But this was still the remnants of the expansion team. The Magic knew things would be different with O’Neal, but now the team actually had to get serious about winning.
That is at least what the 1993 season told them. They were no longer playing at the bottom of the standings.
Before joining the Magic, Tolbert had four up-and-down years with the Charlotte Hornets and Golden State Warriors — going from averaging around eight points per game to two points per game, usually going with his playing time.
He signed with the Magic after averaging 2.6 points per game and 1.6 rebounds per game in 8.9 minutes per game across 35 appearances for the Warriors in the 1992 season. He tallied only 53 starts in his career before joining the Magic.
So it was at least something of a surprise when Tolbert got 61 starts in 73 appearances for the Magic in the 1993 season. He did not start until the ninth game of the season.
Tolbert averaged 8.1 points per game and 5.7 rebounds per game. So the Magic did get one of Tolbert’s best seasons. But it was clearly short of what the Magic needed. Even if just barely for such a young team.
The Magic really struggled to find the right mix at forward and that would remain a theme for the team until free agency solved that problem.
5 worst starters of Orlando Magic’s Shaquille O’Neal era
Jeff Turner (1990-96)
176 starts, 6.5 PPG, 3.6 RPG
Jeff Turner is one of the most important figures in Orlando Magic history.
It is not only that he was a long-tenured player with seven years with the franchise. Or that he was the first free agent to sign with Orlando before that inaugural season in 1990. Or that he is the current and long-time TV analyst for the team’s broadcasts.
Turner will be in the Orlando Magic Hall of Fame at some point. He is deeply embedded in the franchise’s history.
But . . .
There was once a segment on the Magic’s broadcast where they would play a historic moment in Magic history and then cut to a board asking, “What did Jeff Turner do in that game?”
That would often be followed with a fairly modest stat line and his fouls were typically listed to drive home the point.
Turner is fortunately very good natured and able to laugh a bit about his playing career.
He was a player who was a bit ahead of his time as a jump-shooting power forward. But he was also a bit out of time, not quite the physical behemoth that forwards had to be at that time. Turner would often line up at 6-foot-10 at small forward.
In a league that still did not quite know how to use 3-pointers — something the 1995 Magic helped revolutionize — Turner’s skill set was both unused and underdeveloped.
Despite his modest stats, Turner started a lot of games.
He started 51 in the 1994 season, the first time the Magic made the Playoffs, averaging 6.6 points and 4.0 rebounds per game. In some ways, he was a perfect complement for Shaquille O’Neal, able to space the floor around him some.
Turner ended up hitting 73 of 207 3-pointers (35.3 percent) in seven years with the Magic, but he did not really start taking threes until he entered the starting lineup in 1994. He took 55 and made only 18 in the 1994 season (32.7 percent). He upped that to shooting 27 for 75 in the 1995 season (36.0 percent).
Perhaps Turner would have been a bigger weapon for the Magic in the 1994 Playoffs. His lone season as the full-time starter was cut short by a knee injury that forced him to miss the three-game sweep to the Indiana Pacers.
That pressed our next entrant into the starting lineup for that first playoff journey.
5 worst starters of Orlando Magic’s Shaquille O’Neal era
Larry Krystkowiak (1994)
11 starts, 5.1 PPG, 3.6 RPG
Larry Krystkowiak played only 34 games in his lone season with the Orlando Magic. The team signed him just before training camp to give them some forward depth.
He ended up starting the Magic’s first seven games in 1994, scoring in double figures in three of those games. That ended up being three of his six games that season scoring more than 10 points.
Then Krystkowiak was out of the lineup for much of the season after those seven games. He did not play from Nov. 17 to Feb. 27. Assumedly that was because of an injury — that might be lost to time at this point since the Orlando Sentinel foolishly took down their database of game recaps and stories.
Krystkowiak returned for that playoff push and started the final four games before starting all three games in the Orlando Magic’s playoff series with the Indiana Pacers after Jeff Turner got hurt.
Kystkowiak scored a total of 18 points in the series, with 12 of them coming in the final game. He made 7 of 18 shots total in the three-game playoff series, with half of those attempts and five of those makes taking place in Game 3.
To say the least, the Magic had a lack of depth at power forward. And even before Turner’s injury, it was the clear weak spot in the Magic’s lineup — sort of like how shooting guard feels like the weak spot in the Magic’s current lineup.
Krystkowiak was a journeyman by the time he reached Orlando, having spent six seasons with the San Antonio Spurs, Milwaukee Bucks and Utah Jazz.
He was very much a product of his time. A tough-minded defensive forward that provided seemingly little on the offensive end. Although, he had a negative defensive box plus-minus and a -3.2 box plus-minus in his yer with the Magic.
It is probably a problem that you know he played for the Magic but cannot remember much of what he did with the team.
5 worst starters of Orlando Magic’s Shaquille O’Neal era
Anthony Avent (1994-95)
23 starts, 3.6 PPG, 4.3 RPG
For most of Shaquille O’Neal’s tenure with the Orlando Magic, the lineup was fairly set.
Anfernee Hardaway or Scott Skiles manned the point guard spot. There was no debating that. Nick Anderson would start on the wing. Then the team would decide between the 3-point shooting of Dennis Scott and the defensive intensity of Donald Royal. They typically leaned toward Scott because they needed the offense and spacing around O’Neal.
O’Neal turned Anderson into a better 3-point shooter and perimeter weapon as the team started to use the 3-pointer more successfully.
This Magic team did value its versatility though.
Donald Royal and Anthony Bowie, the team’s two best perimeter defenders, were able to guard any player on the wing (Bowie reportedly got the call to defend Hardaway during pre-draft pickup runs with the team and gave the guard his approval to the team). Anderson was a guard who could put his defenders on the post and invert the offense some.
That value in versatility might be why the team went out and acquired Anthony Avent from the Milwaukee Bucks during the 1994 season. Orlando spent a first-round pick (do not worry, it turned into only Eric Mobley) along with a second-round pick and a reserve player to acquire Anthony Avent. They knew they had a problem at forward.
Avent though was a bit undersized to play power forward. At 6-foot-9, he had decent mobility for the time. But he was not any kind of offensive weapon. He never cleared 4.0 points per game for the Magic and his career-best scoring season was 9.8 points per game in 1993 for the Bucks.
In fact, there might have been some hope Avent could add some offensive punch for Orlando. He averaged 7.4 points per game in 33 games (20 starts) for the Bucks before the January trade to Orlando.
Avent did not live up to that potential, to say the least. He just seemed like an odd duck for the Magic and would play only three more seasons (with another three in Greece and the CBA).
Avent could rebound a little bit, which was something the Magic’s other power forwards did not offer. And he was not an overall negative on defense. But Avent was an experiment that did not work for the Magic as they sought the right forward to put with their new big man.
5 worst starters of Orlando Magic’s Shaquille O’Neal era
Jon Koncak (1996)
35 starts, 3.0 PPG, 4.1 RPG
First off, Jon Koncak deserves a lot of credit for helping the 1996 Orlando Magic become the only 60-win team in franchise history.
Shaquille O’Neal missed the first 22 games of the season after breaking his thumb (I believe in a fight with Matt Geiger during the preseason, which is yet another reason to hate the Miami Heat). Koncak, acquired in the offseason in free agency, got the call to start those 22 games.
The Orlando Magic went 17-5 in that time, including the team’s lone win over the 72-10 Chicago Bulls for the entire season. As with any player who is out for some time, there was some questions whether the Magic would integrate O’Neal back in — a silly question to ask in retrospect for several reasons but especially considering the stakes that quickly became clear during that season with O’Neal’s future — but those should have been easily brushed aside.
The time without Shaquille O’Neal allowed Anfernee Hardaway to blossom and become the superstar O’Neal should have needed to bring a title to Orlando.
In that time starting, Koncak averaged 4.3 points and 5.9 rebounds per game in 26.3 minutes per game. The Magic leaned heavily on O’Neal when he returned and Koncak dropped to 11.5 minutes per game as a reserve the rest of the season.
Koncak’s career is mostly known for his nickname “Jon Contract,” given to him after he signed a deal that paid him a top amount of $2.9 million in the 1994 season. That was a hefty amount at the time — an amount that alienated Dominique Wilkins and led to his sojourn to Greece and eventually the Los Angeles Clippers and Boston Celtics.
Making the case more for Koncak not being a great investment for the Magic (even for a year) is that the 1996 season was the last of his career. Even after the Orlando Magic traded him to the Golden State Warriors along with Donald Royal, his career was done.
If there is that silver lining, that trade helped the Magic acquire Rony Seikaly. The first, and probably the best, player the Magic had to replace Shaquille O’Neal at center until they drafted Dwight Howard in 2004.