The Orlando Magic made their statement in May when they acquired Desmond Bane in a blockbuster trade.
The move was a statement of intent. The Magic were ready to contend. They were ready to play a more serious level of basketball.
They invited the pressure. They proudly proclaimed they were going for a championship. Those aspirations were not quiet.
To be a champion, you have to be able to beat a champion. And the gap between a team like the Orlando Magic and a championship team like the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder seems wider than ever now.
Those offseason ambitions have given way to a sobering reality.
The Magic are not in the same league as the Thunder. That should be plain as day after the Thunder coasted to a 128-92 victory on Tuesday. There was not an area where the magic could claim victory against the defending champions.
"Everything. Better pace, physicality, they were more crisp than us in their actions," Jalen Suggs said after Tuesday's loss. "They got in transition on us. Every aspect of the game. That's the reason we went down so big so early. For us, especially coming against a team like this, you have to be intentional out of the game. You have to come and fight out of the gate and keep yourself in the game."
That is a chilling statement two days before the trade deadline. This Magic team is not anywhere near the same level as the title favorites. And it does not feel like relief is coming.
The Thunder ran them off the floor, bottling up their attempts to get to the rim, running off the turnovers and misses and generally being unbothered by anything the Magic tried to do to stop them.
Oklahoma City led 39-14 after the first quarter. The game was essentially over before it started. That will not get the job done if this team truly has the championship aspirations they help.
This was plainly not a championship effort.
It has felt like the Magic have been a long way from that championship effort for a few months now. Those championship aspirations could not be any farther away.
A champion's difference
The Oklahoma City Thunder are good for a reason. They have a sound offensive and defensive system. It takes a focused and precise effort to beat them.
The bigger thing with them is that they have a good sense of who they are. They are unbothered and play their game. They do not shift to meet the opponent.
The Orlando Magic's first few possessions started off well enough. They got a few open shots and contested and defended. The Thunder took an early lead, but the game was far from lost.
But the shots kept missing. Suddenly Orlando seemed like it was pressing to try to create anything in the paint. That is what Oklahoma City wants. The Thunder make everything so difficult, they force teams out of character and into misakes they can pounce on to get in transition.
Orlando lost the first quarter 39-14 because the team shot so poorly -- 4 for 22 from the floor (18.8 percent) and 0 for 10 from three. But the lead got out of hand early because of the all the mistakes that compounded on top of it.
The Thunder scored eight points off five turnovers. They had seven second-chance points and outscored the Magic 14-4 in the paint. They won all the hustle points that seemed so key to the Magic's (former) identity.
"Those are just the small details within the game that when you play a team like this, you have to know that's what they do," coach Jamahl Mosley said after Tuesday's loss. "It's enough to watch it on film, you walk through it in the morning, you can show it to them, walk through and touch it, when you go out there, you have to produce when you play a team like this."
There was again a lack of precision and attention to detail on both ends. The Thunder lifted the top off the defense with a pair of lobs to Isaiah Hartenstein.
As has happened so often this season, the Magic's poor shooting affected their defensive intensity. They never reeled things back.
Where Oklahoma City just found its groove and played its game, Orlando was searching for something that might not be there this year.
A lost identity?
Every great team needs an identity. They need the thing they know they can rely on. The thing that is their backbone that can carry them through the Playoffs and even their worst days.
Identity, for whatever that term can be defined as, was the one thing the Orlando Magic felt they could rely on. It is the one foundation they thought was strong.
This was a team that was in the top-five in defensive rating each of the last two years, finishing second last year behind the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Even with a significantly worse offense, the Magic were still solid defensively. They fought the human nature to get down about their shooting and stuck to their defense. It created offense for them with turnovers. They dragged teams into the mud.
Opponents knew they played the Magic next day because of how physical and punishing they were.
That identity has completely left them. The Magic are now 16th in the league in defensive rating at 114.6 points allowed per 100 possessions. Tuesday's loss was the 17th time giving up a defensive rating of 120 or worse after doing so just eight times last year and the fifth time giving up more than 130 points per 100 possessions after doing so just three times.
A team that was stout at defending the paint now bleeds points in the paint, getting outscored on the interior 60-26 and 14-4 in the first quarter. Orlando's 26 points in the paint was a season low by 10 points.
The Magic do not do anything that looks like Magic basketball with any consistency.
"You don't look at the other team, you look at your own process and what you have got going on," Jalen Suggs said after Tuesday's loss. "It wasn't good enough clearly. The things we're talking about and the places we want to go, they set the standard for it. When you come across a team like that, they are going to check if you are about it for real. It's tough to lose any night, but losing like that really sucks."
Orlando felt like it could make its all-in move and talk openly about a championship because the team felt it had this foundation set.
But it is gone now.
Orlando's ambitions feel like a fantasy now. This team is a long ways away from contention.