The Orlando Magic know their identity at this point.
Under coach Jamahl Mosley during the last four seasons, he has successfully built on his reputation as a strong and aggressive defensive coach. The Magic have turned into one of the top defensive teams in the league.
They made the playoffs the last two years on the strength of top-five defense, finishing second in the league this past season.
That is enough to get by in the regular season. It is enough to get them to the Playoffs. But it is not enough to win.
The messaging from exit interviews for the Magic was abundantly clear. They are ready to be more aggressive and address the team's biggest weaknesses in a meaningful way. The team desperately needs an infusion of offense -- shooting, creation and playmaking.
The Orlando Magic finished 27th in the league in offensive rating and hit 100 points just once in a five-game series with the Boston Celtics. They were last in the league in 3-point shooting, and all of their key shooters seemed to regress and shoot worse this season.
The question then is how do the Magic fix their shooting woes? And how quickly can they fix them?
There is at least one example for a quick fix. The Magic do not have to look far.
The Detroit Pistons worked a miracle to fix their offense in one offseason. They showed it does not take much to turn a corner.
The Detroit Pistons' quick fix
In the 2024 season, the Detroit Pistons shot 34.8 percent from three (26th in the league). They were by far the worst team in the league and had the 27th-best offense in the league at 109.0 points per 100 possessions.
Some of that was because Cade Cunningham played 62 games and struggled with lingering effects of his season-long injury from the year before. Some of that was that the Pistons did not have enough shooting surrounding their star player -- and a disastrous coaching situation to boot.
The Pistons' hiring of J.B. Bickerstaff was only the first step in fixing things in Detroit. The real secret sauce came from the decisions executive Trajan Langdon made.
He spent free agent money on Tobias Harris to give the team another scorer and veteran to hold the ship steady and provide another attacker next to the guard duo of Cade Cunningham and Jaden Ivey.
The real work was done adding the shooting that transformed the Pistons' offense.
They acquired Tim Hardaway Jr. -- and three second-round picks! -- for Quentin Grimes, taking on an injured and veteran sharpshooter on the cheap to boost the team. They also signed Malik Beasley to a one-year, $6 million deal after a sometimes frustrating season with the Milwaukee Bucks.
Detroit bet on its internal growth, but added three key veterans to change the offense. And they all hit.
The Pistons ' offensive rating improved to 14th in the league at 114.6 points per 100 possessions. They shot 36.2 percent from three, 17th in the league. And, of course, the Pistons went from 14 wins to 44 wins.
Beasley shot 41.6 percent from three on 9.6 attempts per game. Hardaway shot 36.8 percent on 5.9 attempts per game. Adding that volume changed how teams defended them, unlocking the best version of a healthy Cunningham in addition to a much-improved Ivey.
A lot of that came down to adding veterans to surround the young players, a coach invested in their growth and then the key young players taking a major step on both ends of the floor.
As the Magic learned during their 2024 season, confidence is a heck of a drug.
But it also shows it does not take much to transform the offense. Orlando has a model to follow this summer as the team looks to find improved shooting.
The model to follow
Clearly adding one shooter is not enough.
The Orlando Magic signed Kentavious Caldwell-Pope as a sharpshooter in free agency last year to help fix some of the shooting issues. He fit well into the team's defensive identity and gave the team a championship-level veteran to boost a young team.
Caldwell-Pope fit with the team culturally and gave the team an air of seriousness, certainly when the team was healthy. But he struggled with his shooting all season, shooting 34.2 percent from three (his worst mark since 2016) and averaging 8.7 points per game (his lowest since his rookie year in 2014).
The concern with signing Caldwell-Pope was the low volume of his shooting. He averaged 4.1 3-point attempts per game during the 2024 season with the Denver Nuggets. He averaged 4.3 per game with the Magic this year.
Caldwell-Pope is also almost exclusively a spot-up shooter. The difference is how quickly Beasley and Hardaway Jr. could get their shots up and the fact that they were shooting so much more.
One of Orlando's key needs this offseason is a volume shooter.
Right now, Jalen Suggs at 6.9 3-point attempts per game (31.4 percent 3-point field goal percentage), Paolo Banchero at 5.9 attempts per game (32.0 percent) and Franz Wagner at 5.9 attempts per game (29.5 percent) are the team's volume three-point shooters. They are also the players who should be attacking the most off the dribble. They are the team's highest-usage players.
Orlando needs to separate those two roles and add one or two players to be the volume shooters who get passes from these creators. The team needs some shooters to alleviate the pressure on the best players so they do not have to do everything.
It would also help if these volume shooters make their shots too, of course.
The sour feeling about Caldwell-Pope's signing is because he did not deliver the kind of shooting the Magic hoped for. Add that to poor shooting seasons from those three key players -- and Wendell Carter, and Gary Harris, and Jonathan Isaac, etc. -- and it turned into a recipe for 3-point shooting disaster.
A long road to walk?
The question is: How far are the Orlando Magic from that shooting breakthrough? Is it really like the Detroit Pistons about finding the right volume shooters and inserting them into a confident group that builds momentum for wins down the road?
Jeff Weltman spelled it plainly during exit interviews that the team is looking for spacing, creation and shooting. He is looking for the exact things the Pistons found last summer that helped lead them to their breakthrough.
A similar breakthrough does not feel far off for the Magic. There are certainly opportunities to find shooters to boost the Magic.
It still will not be easy. Even the Pistons took a gamble on Tim Hardaway Jr. being healthy. They ultimately got a healthy season from Cade Cunningham (and had the depth to withstand Jaden Ivey's injury).
Internal improvement is still part of this equation. The Magic need their best players to improve as 3-point shooters, too. That is part of the team's growth.
But alleviating the volume of 3-point shooting from the stars and giving them more volume in a supporting cast is a clear way to unlock them. The same way the Pistons unlocked Cunningham.
It is clear the Magic have to add another creator off the dribble and a volume shooter this offseason to make this kind of breakthrough.
At least they know it can be done.