Orlando Magic answer doubts with powerful Play-In performance

There was a lot of doubt with the Orlando Magic entering their elimination game.

There season was a grand disappointment, failing to climb into the upper echelons of the Eastern Conference or point toward contention. Everything was pointing downward as injuries and inconsistency overcame the team.

The Orlando Magic were roundly picked (including by me) to lose their elimination game to the streaking and more entertaining Charlotte Hornets. Orlando was team turmoil, seemingly drifting toward the offseason, and asking big questions about their future.

The Magic decided that their season would not end without a fight. As Desmond Bane put it, they do not want this season to end despite all the frustration that has built up throughout the year. The directive was not to leave anything out on the floor.

Orlando pounced from the beginning and grew their lead throughout, making the second half irrelevant. By the end, it was as much as a 35-point lead and a 121-90 win. All the doubts of the past 48 hours gave way to another potential feeling:

Fear. This Magic team can still be that good.

"That's what playoff teams are supposed to look like," Jalen Suggs said in the locker room after Friday's win. "That's a team that has high expectations to play in the 'offs and make a run is supposed to come out like. As amazing as it was tonight, the attention to detail, the energy and the pace that we played at were high level. It means nothing if it doesn't travel."

The Magic have not been the team everyone thought they could be. But that team is still in there.

Friday it came out to devastating effect as the Magic set a strong physical tone and never relented.

Physical from the start

The Orlando Magic have ben asking themselves for months: What is their identity?

They seemed to conceptually know what it should be with their hounding and physical defense, throwing bodies at offenive players and constricting space. But they rarely executed it.

That is how everything slipped so much. How they fell to 13th in defensive rating and looked more like a .500 team than a contending one.

With their backs against the wall, the Magic knew they had to put action behind their words. They needed to come out and set a physical tone.

The Orlando Magic blitzed the Charlotte Hornets from the start, leading 38-16 after one quarter. They attacked the paint and did not relent.

They never found their footing as the Magic swarmed them and made all the pressure of an elimination game feel greater. Orlando played with a desperation and urgency it has missed so much thisseason.

"You either had a chance to end your season, or you start a new one," coach Jamahl Mosley said after Friday's win. "These guys made a commitment to each other and to our staff that we want to keep playing basketball. It showed up first and foremost on the defensive end. That defense in the first half was probably about as elite as we have seen in a while."

It was a defensive masterclass in every way.

They drew offensive fouls on illegal screens with their intensity guarding the Hornets' excellent shooters. They frustrated the Hornets into several shot-clock violations, including back-to-back erorrs late in the first quarter.

The Magic held one of the best offensive teams to just 90 points and their third-worst offensive rating of the season at 90.9 points per 100 possessions, forced 20 turnovers for 26 points. Charlotte made only 12 of 45 threes (26.7 percent).

Everything worked as the Magic disrupted the Hornets' offensive flow.

"I thought it was one of our best games in terms of staying focused on what our strategy was all game," Franz Wagner said after Friday's win. "I think we bothered them all night, got them out of their sets and had them taking shots for the most part that we wanted them taking. It speaks to our character and how much we want to be in the playoffs, considering how the season has gone."

This was Magic basketball.

Magic never let up

The Orlando Magic's good moments have never lasted.

That is why the Magic are eighth in the Eastern Conference and had to fight for their spot. The doubts that entered this game centered on that inconsistency.

What has characterized this team is how quickly they seemingly dropped the ball. They could go from juggernaut to also-ran in a matter of moments and then never get it back.

What stood out about Friday's win was how the Magic never relented. They took the elite defense and opportunistic offense from the first quarter and kept it going throughout the game. The Hornets never got comfortable and never made a serious threat at the lead.

Even when the Hornets made a small push, the Magic were scrambling for steals and beating them to every loose ball.

The defining play of the game saw Desmond Bane dive on the floor to beat LaMelo Ball to gain possession and feed it to Tristan da Silva who pushed it to Franz Wagner to find Jamal Cain for an alley-oop.

That was part of an 8-0 run to that pushed the lead back to 31 points after the Hornets cut it to 23 near the end of the third quarter. That Bane sacrificed himself for a loose ball in a blowout game to preserve that cushion speaks to the effort and intensity the Magic brought.

This is the kind of team they always could be defensively. It has only come out rarely.

"We were ready to fight, ready to extend our season and get our spot in the Playoffs," Paolo Banchero said after Friday's win. "Nobody wanted to go home today. I thought we came out and played really motivated."

This was how the Magic always imagined they would play. This was the vision.

Orlando found it when they most desperately needed it. The team proved it could still be a factor.

"We did what we were supposed to do," coach Jamahl Mosley said after Friday's win. "I think there is a reason to be happy tonight. At the end of the day there is still work to do because we know what this team is absolutely capable of."

But one game will not be enough. The Magic are now 16 away from a championship. And they will need it most of all in Game 1 Sunday in Detroit.

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