SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The shorthanded Orlando Magic may not have broken a(nother) shooting record inside Golden 1 Center this time around, but they did break a four-game skid.
Pulling away in the fourth quarter, the Magic secured a 107-100 win behind key nights from Franz Wagner, Desmond Bane and Anthony Black.
Here were a few of our takeaways.
Magic were running on fumes with thin depth:
This has been the case for most of the season, but the Magic were especially thin on Tuesday.
Tristan da Silva was put on the injury report Tuesday morning with a calf strain, meaning the Magic were down three key rotation players in Paolo Banchero, Jalen Suggs and da Silva. Orlando had just 11 players active, including nine players on standard contracts and a pair of two-way players.
The only one who did not see any playing time was Colin Castleton (two-way). Alex Morales played a career-high 28 minutes, scoring seven points and knocking down his first 3-pointer with 7:08 left in the first half.
Four of the five Magic starters played at least 31 minutes; Goga Bitadze played 15 minutes and Nikola Vucevic also logged a season high in minutes with 18.
Now, I’m curious to see if these rotation pattern stay the same Wednesday on the second night of a back-to-back.
Orlando lacked answers for Sacramento’s rookie (defensively):
Despite the result, Kings rookie Darius Acuff played exceptionally well once again — as did Zach LaVine.
Orlando deployed drop against Acuff for most of the night, and he feasted for 29 points on 10-of-21 shooting and 4-of-9 from 3-point range. He was consistently finding open creases against the Magic’s drop when he put either of their three bigs in the action.
The Magic defense had a little more resistance on switches and hedges, but the Kings’ No. 7 overall draft choice still got to his spots fairly routinely.
Kings were throwing the ball all over the place:
Sacramento was careless. Very careless.
So much so that the Kings had 18 turnovers — with over three minutes left in the third quarter.
The Magic capitalized well, turning those into 33 points. The Kings’ 21 turnovers marked the most a Magic opponent has committed this season.
Attack, attack, attack!:
It was clear from the opening tip what the Magic’s plan of attack was offensively when Acuff was on the floor: Put him in every single action and make him guard.
Orlando was relentlessly attacking Acuff all night — especially Franz Wagner. The German wing finished with 31 points on 11-of-23 shooting with seven rebounds and seven assists. The Kings rookie only committed two fouls, but his size (or lack thereof) opened up plenty of pockets of space that they took advantage of.
The Magic scored 56 points in the paint at a 56.0 percent clip, including 10 from inside the restricted area. They only attempted four non-paint 2s.
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