Wendell Carter has been a great asset to the Orlando Magic's young core. He simply does all the dirty work that does not show up on the box score and leads to winning. He is a great locker-room presence too. And his teammates love him.
Every team needs a guy like that.
Certainly, teams with future championship aspirations like the Magic do even more so.
Carter has shown himself to be a solid floor spacer, he has had great defensive games against other opposing superstar big men. He has also proven to be a very deadly lob threat in the pick and roll, more specifically with Franz Wagner and Markelle Fultz.
He is simply the perfect modern-day big man. He checks all the boxes for what a team looks for in a center on and off the floor. The only knock on him is his oft-injury occurrences that hurt his team when he is absent on the floor.
This season, the Magic have been able to stay more than afloat since he broke his hand in early November with a 12-5 record without him. That is thanks to the franchise-record-tying nine-game win streak. Goga Bitadze has been able to replicate a lot of what Wendell Carter does for this team. Setting hard screens, rolling to the basket, finishing with authority, being a playmaker and dishing out great passes from the top of the key.
Like every NBA team, the Magic rely on their starting center to anchor their defensive end. When Carter is on top of his game, it just simply shifts the dynamic of the Magic to a whole other level.
3 Ways Wendell Carter can make the Orlando Magic more potent
3-Point shooting
The first way Wendell Carter can improve even more is by becoming a great 3-point shooter.
Three-point shooting is vital in today's league at all five positions. If a player is not a good three-point shooter, he needs to be simply very very good at another part of the game to justify coaches to put him on the floor to make up for the lack of three-point shooting.
He already is a very solid three-point shooter for a big man. He shot 35.6 percent last season on 3.9 attempts per game. If he can get that number up to the 38-plus percent range, it will help the Magic a ton, specifically Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner, as their driving lanes would open up a ton.
More specifically, Carter needs to make defenses pay for leaving him open. Defenses often do that in order to stop Banchero or Wagner from driving.
Last season, Carter shot 34.2 percent on wide-open threes (this is when the nearest defender is six or more feet away). He got 2.8 wide-open three-point attempts per game and made exactly one.
If Carter can become a respectable 3-point shooter from the corners, it will make the Magic that much more potent.
This season, as great as Goga Bitadze has been in Wendell Carter's absence, the only knock on him has been his inability to space the floor. At times, there have been instances where Banchero or Wagner drove to the basket but ran out of real estate due to the log jam of bodies there.
3 Ways Wendell Carter can make the Orlando Magic more potent
Rim Protection and Shot-Blocking
Secondly, Wendell Carter needs to become a better shot blocker.
His rim deterrence rate last season was +0.01 percent which ranked in the 48th percentile in the NBA. His block rates on contests was at 13.11 percent, which ranked in the 50th percentile in the NBA. Blocking shots does not directly correlate to a player being good on defense.
Carter is actually one of the best interior defending bigs in the league.
But not having the shot-blocking presence repeatedly results in players driving over and over again to the rim. Albeit, they may not make as many as they expect due to Carter's great positioning. But, the main point of defending is to limit the amount of paint touches for the other team.
Carter is a very special interior defender.
Last season, opponents shot 7.05 percentage points worse than expected at the rim, which ranked in the 94th percentile in the NBA, per Basketball Index. That stat shows the field goal percentage that opposing players shot at the rim vs what Second Spectrum would expect them to shoot.
This season in five games, players have made just 39.4 percent of their shots against Carter at the rim. That is extremely good.
So in a vacuum, players shot seven percentage points worse than they normally would.
Carter's screener rim defense was a +0.69 last season, which ranked 97th percentile in the league.
All in all, Carter is a great defender. But becoming a better shot blocker would take both his defense and the Magic's defense to a whole another level.
3 Ways Wendell Carter can make the Orlando Magic more potent
Rebounding
Lastly, Wendell Carter can improve by going back to being the dominant rebounder he was early in his Orlando Magic tenure.
In the 2022 season, Carter averaged 10.5 rebounds per game. That number dipped to 8.7 last season, nearly two rebounds per game less. And in five games played this season, he is averaging 8.6 rebounds per game.
His offensive rebounding has remained the same, it hovers around 2.2-2.3 per game each season but his defensive rebounding has dipped from being in the 8-range to the 6-range.
Carter is one of the strongest guys in the league, he needs to use that to his advantage again like he did a couple of seasons ago.
After all, finishing off defensive possessions with a rebound is the key to becoming a great defensive team.
All in all, Carter is simply a very solid player. He is exactly the type of center this team needs.
Some of these things were a bit nit-picky but they are still important as the Magic continue to improve and especially when they get to the Playoffs.
The Magic will need Carter to be healthy in their upcoming stretch of games too, as 18 of their next 24 games are against teams in the top six in their conference. The other six opponents who are not include the Memphis Grizzlies with a returning Ja Morant in the lineup and the Golden State Warriors who are always tough. And also, the Orlando Magic face the Atlanta Hawks twice, a team they lost to earlier this season in Mexico City.
Carter is still just getting back onto the court after having the cast removed from his left hand. He was on the court doing workouts for the first time before Friday's game against the Detroit Pistons. It will still be some time before he returns. But he will jump in at a critical time for the Magic.