Orlando Magic | Pace and Space

The Orlando Magic Worst Season: 2013

October 10, 2022 - by Fox Doucette

The Orlando Magic have been one of the NBA’s worst teams over the past 10 seasons. In seven of those years, they have failed to win 30 games, and even though one of those was a COVID-truncated 72-game season, 21-51 still would’ve required them to win nine out of ten in an 82-game season. And that was never realistic. This year, Orlando faces 2,000 to 1 odds of winning the title. Face it, 2023 may become the worst season this team has ever had. But this isn’t about the future. We have to consider what’s already happened. And since Orlando …

Analysis

Achtung Panzer! The 6-25 Orlando Magic

December 18, 2021 - by Fox Doucette - 1 Comment

The Orlando Magic inexplicably beat the Brooklyn Nets Saturday night to run their record to 6-25, still second-worst in the league ahead of only the dreadful Detroit Pistons, but they should’ve been 5-26 after playing the likes of Brooklyn, even with three Nets players in health and safety protocols and Kyrie Irving in anti-vaxxer hell. But in the grand scheme of the 2022 NBA season, the Magic didn’t exactly upend the order of the Eastern Conference. Coming into the Brooklyn game, Orlando was 28th on offense, 29th on defense, and 30th for Net Rating…in a 30-team league. They’re third up …

Analysis

The Orlando Magic’s Best Season: 2009

October 11, 2021October 11, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

To say the Orlando Magic got lost in the shuffle during an era of NBA history punctuated by the likes of the Celtics, Lakers, Cavaliers, and later the Miami Heat is a bit of an understatement. After all, in the teaser for this very article at the end of yesterday’s piece about the Thunder, I all but called out Nick Anderson, expecting to write about the 1995 Magic and their lost Finals to the Houston Rockets in the second and last year of the Jordan Interregnum. But, as is always the case in these features, I looked over the franchise …

Analysis

5 NBA Teams Are 4-1. They’re Completely Different.

January 1, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

As the NBA heads into the 2021 calendar year, the 76ers, Pacers, Magic, Clippers, and Suns are all 4-1, tied for first in their respective conferences. Indeed, the Magic were the last unbeaten holdout, winning their first four games before losing to Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve. But if five games have taught us anything, there’s more than one way to win four out of five in professional basketball. Let’s take a look at the five best teams in the league as of ten days into the season and see what they have in common…and what makes no sense about …

Is He Any Good

Jonathan Isaac: Is He Any Good?

March 13, 2020 - by Fox Doucette

One of the oldest and most basic rules of this regular feature is “never evaluate a player before his third season in the league.” Because there have been some truly dreadful debut campaigns by guys who went on to become solid NBA players. In recent years, we’ve seen De’Aaron Fox put up a truly dreadful rookie campaign, posting a minus-1.1 VORP and negative Win Shares in his first year in the league. In Year 2, Fox posted 2.3 VORP and .103 WS/48, which are the kinds of numbers you see from borderline All-Stars, and in 45 games in Year 3, …

Analysis

The 2020 NBA Eastern Conference is Historically Bad

February 24, 2020 - by Fox Doucette

Since 1996-97, when the Los Angeles Clippers made the playoffs with a 36-46 record (and promptly got swept in the first round by the eventual Finals team in Utah), the Western Conference has sent zero teams to the playoffs with a losing record. In that same stretch of 22 full seasons, the East has sent 12 teams to the playoffs with a losing record, the worst of which was a plug-awful Boston Celtics team that went 36-46 with Mark Blount as their second-best player by VORP (1.7) and Raef LaFrentz as the team leader in WS/48 (.137; Paul Pierce put …

2020 Preview

Are the 2019-20 Orlando Magic Good?

October 1, 2019 - by Fox Doucette

The Orlando Magic won the Southeast Division in 2018-19 mostly because somebody had to. Late in the season, it looked entirely possible that the division winner would post a losing record, and the Magic made the playoffs as a 7 seed because there weren’t 8 good teams in the other two divisions in the East (it turned out there were seven, with the Bulls, Cavs, and Knicks finishing 13-15 in the conference. The Southeast Division took spots 9 through 12 inclusive.) Thankfully, the NBA did away with division seeding a few years back, so the 42-40 Magic didn’t get a …

Analysis

NBA Best And Worst Contracts Part III: Southeast Division

August 21, 2019August 22, 2019 - by Fox Doucette

In the previous two editions of this series, we took a look at the best and worst contracts in the Atlantic and Central Divisions, and we finish our look at the Eastern Conference today with the Dumpster fire that is the Southeast Division—a division Orlando won with a 42-40 record and sent no other teams to the playoffs. Which, in turn, points to the wisdom of the NBA making its playoff standards division agnostic. In the old days, the 4 seed Magic would’ve hosted the 5 seed Celtics in Game 1 of the first round, a Celtics team that won …

Highlights

Breakfast Special: Nice Knowin’ Ya, Brett Brown

April 14, 2019 - by Fox Doucette

Philadelphia 76ers coach Brett Brown deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award for seeing the Sixers through the deepest dark of the Process and into the playoffs. But the question needs asked: Is Brown going to be tarred with the brush of a “rebuilding coach”, the guy you hire when you’re going to do a franchise teardown and then let go when the team is good to bring in a guy who’s more a veteran-leadership playoff coach in the mold of guys like Steve Kerr, Gregg Popovich, and Phil Jackson? Not that there’s anything wrong with turnaround guys; for every …

Highlights

Breakfast Special: Blazin’ the Nets in Portland

March 26, 2019 - by Fox Doucette

There were only four NBA games on Monday night, so of course one of them had to go 10 extra minutes to make up for it. The Portland Trail Blazers held home court, clinched a playoff berth, and made the race between 6 and 9 in the East a little more interesting by dropping the Brooklyn Nets 148-144. Damian Lillard was wildly inefficient in this one, scoring 32 points but requiring 31 shots to do it, while D’Angelo Russell wasn’t much better for Brooklyn with 39 points on 16-of-34. All the same, even by the standards of double ovetime, this …