Orlando Magic's offseason puts the pressure on Paolo Banchero to star

The Orlando Magic a week away from beginning training camp for the season.

Excitement among the fan base has been palpable since the Father's Day trade to acquire Desmond Bane seemed to send things into overdrive. It is safe to say that people within the Magic organization share that excitement.

Expectations for the team have skyrocketed. The Magic's over/under on FanDuel is still at 50.5 wins for the season. They are widely predicted to finish third in the Eastern Conference. There is a general belief that the Magic are knocking on the door to contention.

For the first time in a long time, the pressure is on the Magic to deliver results. Making the Playoffs is no longer good enough, the Magic need to advance deeper into the Playoffs. Even the usually tight-lipped Jeff Weltman has clearly stated Orlando has championship ambitions.

Whether the Magic reach that or not remains the question. And that is a question that ultimately falls on the play of the team's star players, Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner.

Both have plenty of questions to answer, but the mileage of the Magic's investment in acquiring Bane likely comes down to your belief in Banchero and Wagner as team-anchoring stars.

That was the lingering question throughout the offseason: Is a young player like Banchero ready for the pressure that comes with a team trying to win a championship? Can he shoulder that burden? And are the Magic right to invest in him to that extent?

That was the crux of the argument all summer, whether it was consideration of whether Jalen Williams is a better player than Paolo Banchero already from the same draft class or whether it was outright questioning why the Magic sunk four first-round picks into Bane to begin with.

"In this era of NBA parity, I do not think you can make the assumptions of how good you are going to be for how long that you might think," Bomani Jones said on The Right Stuff shortly after the trade was made. "Especially, it's a team that doesn't have a front-line superstar. Without the presence of a front-line superstar, I don't understand what they are doing."

Essentially, any criticism of this trade is really a question about Banchero and Wagner. Are they ready to take the leap the team needs?

The Magic clearly believe they are and are fully invested in this core to deliver them as far as they can go.

The path of stardom

All any team has when it is building its team is belief. It is belief in the process, the coaching and the players.

Orlando initiated that belief when it took Paolo Banchero first in that contested 2022 NBA Draft over Chet Holmgren and Jabari Smith. They were all-in on what Banchero is and could be.

He has not disappointed them at all. He averaged 20.0 points per game in his rookie season and was an All-Star in his second season, leading the Magic back to the Playoffs. He was stellar again last season, even fighting through the oblique injury that sidelined him for two weeks.

Still doubts and questions surround Banchero. His critics will say that he is still too inefficient as a shooter and that the numbers say the Magic are better when he is off the floor. There are truth to those.

The added context shows that Banchero took several meaningful steps last year. After struggling for a month after his injury, he was very efficient, averaging 29.0 points per game and shooting a 58.1 percent true shooting percentage in the 24 games he played after the All-Star break.

Banchero was not satisfied with those individual numbers. He wants the team's success. And that is what drove him into the offseason.

There are plenty of hints that Banchero is ready to step up and be an All-NBA player. Being on the Magic, he has largely done it in anonymity and away from the national spotlight. There are a lot of fans and pundits who simply have not watched Banchero play enough.

But the Magic clearly saw enough. His playoff showing, where he averaged 29.4 points per game with a defense loaded completely to stop him, was a sure sign that he was a primetime performer.

Orlando just needed to get him the spacing and supporting cast to take advantage of his talents.

Belief means pressure

The sticker shock of the cost of trading for Desmond Bane has certainly worn off in the three months since the deal.

The Orlando Magic traded Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Cole Anthony and four future first-round picks for Desmond Bane. It was a huge gamble on a singular player to help elevate this team.

Taking that alongside the max contract the Magic gave Franz Wagner last summer and the max extension -- likely to become a supermax extension -- to Paolo Banchero, it states how invested this team is in this core. This was a now-or-never summer.

If the Magic did not push their chips in this summer, the salary cap would prevent them from doing so. Orlando was more or less backed into a corner to do something if the team believes this was a championship core.

That financial investment certainly suggests the team sees itself at that level already, too. There were some suggestions that Banchero made it known that the team needed to improve its supporting cast to get the team to the next level. They likely did not need that input.

But with great expectations comes the responsibility to meet them. All the critics are right about one thing: The Magic have invested a significant part of their future in Banchero continuing to improve and becoming the leader of a championship team.

No team sits in the second apron if they are not competing for a title. The Magic are not in the second apron yet. But they will be next season. And so by then, the Magic need to be contending for championships.

And that is where stars' legacies are made.

Banchero is a star. The Magic believe in him as a star. They have built a roster that is betting on his stardom.

The Magic's success or failure this season will fall on him to deliver. The Magic making these moves have put that pressure on him.

It is time for him to deliver and make everyone else believers.