The Magic‘s Mount Rushmore is up there with any team.
Shaq.
Penny.
Dwight.
T-Mac.
Zooming out, Magic fans appreciate big time players from every era – from Paolo, Franz, Bane, Suggs in this era; to Anderson, Scott, and Skiles in the first era; to Hedo, Jameer, and Rashard in the mid-2000s to Oladipo, Vucevic, Gordon and Isaac in between.
Orlando has had its share of potential stars; what have the Magic done with all this talent?
Mostly waste it, winning 0 titles in 37 years of existence, while either running off every star player they’ve ever had, or running them into the ground if they stay.
2 Finals Appearances, 1 Finals Game Win, plenty of memorable playoff moments, but no hardware to show for it.
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Nick Anderson, Orlando’s first superstar, was also the team’s first scapegoat in franchise history. After an all-time low individual moment let his team down, Anderson was left hung out to dry by the team in the media, taking the blame for a Finals loss where the whole team got scared and got swept. Maybe a little public backing in the worst moment of his career could have helped Nick and a young Magic team get some confidence back; instead, the team wasn’t ever the same after the Finals loss.
Shaquille O’Neal eventually left for Hollywood to make movies, drop rap albums, and become a global sensation. But Shaq hasn’t been shy about blaming the Orlando Sentinel’s infamous poll for his decision to leave, where some genius decided to ask average sized human beings if a basketball player should make $100 Million dollars; as if that basketball player wasn’t arguably the most incredible athlete the sport had ever seen, and as if other comparable bigs at the time weren’t already making relatively the same amount.
The man that put the Magic on the map walked out the door because his fans and his team didn’t respect him, publicly or financially; that blame falls on Orlando creating a situation so bad where a player of Shaq’s magnitude wants to leave the team that drafted him, in the 90s, years before most players would even consider doing so.
Penny Hardaway was force fed shots as the primary star after Shaq left. While on any individual night he could handle the superstar load as a spectacular talent, eventually the high usage seemingly caught up to Penny with injuries to the point where he was never the same athlete going forward.
Grant Hill recently came out publicly on Tracy McGrady & Vince Carter‘s Cousins podcast to directly call out the Magic’s doctors for mishandling his injuries, which is notable since these are 3 of the most famous Magic players in franchise history.
Hill claims the Orlando Magic rushed him to play on his injured foot to be ready by the season opener, as if celebrating the signing of a player was more important than the player. The lack of needed rehab time led to debilitating injuries the rest of Hill’s career, spoiling the entire 5-year era with Tracy McGrady in Orlando, who went on to demand a trade because the Magic failed to find him a supporting cast after losing Hill from their own doing and never recovering.
The irony isn’t lost on Magic fans that the ‘throw-in prospects’ Orlando sent to Detroit in the sign-and-trade for Hill to team up with T-Mac ended up anchoring the very biggest playoff obstacle McGrady faced in his time in Orlando – The 2000s Pistons led by Ben Wallace and Chauncey Billups.
Orlando’s coach of the Heart & Hustle team that first featured a young Ben Wallace? None other than Coach of the Year, Doc Rivers.
After John Gabriel ingeniously manipulated the salary cap by shedding salaries for the first time in sports history, Orlando had a real shot at signing Tim-friggin-Duncan away from the Spurs to join Hill and McGrady, in what would have been the biggest of Big 3s to ever Big 3.
Rivers not so ingeniously told Timmy his family couldn’t ride on the team plane. For some reason, Duncan stayed in San Antonio.
After making the NBA Finals in 2009, the Magic let Hedo Turkoglu walk; Turk was truly the glue to the offense, the best scoring creator for the team, and the best playmaking option in pick-and-rolls with Dwight. While they acquired Vince Carter in a separate transaction, and certainly found good depth the following year such as uncovering Ryan Anderson, losing Turkoglu felt like a line in the sand moment that this iteration of the team never fully recovered from.
When the team saw a public spat between its coach and player in Stan Van Gundy and Dwight Howard, the team chose to keep the star player after his demand to fire the best coach in franchise history. 3 months later, Dwight demanded out himself, leaving the team with neither the coach or the star that built them such a dominant presence in Orlando, they locked in a new arena for the city.
Dwight followed his fellow former Magic Superman to Los Angeles, deciding that the Heatles and Big 3 Celtics were too star-heavy for him to take on alone; ironically, he never found a supporting cast anywhere close to as complementary to his skillset as the roster built around him in Orlando.
We might as well mention Fran Vazques, the Magic’s lottery pick (11th) in 2005 who would’ve developed with Dwight but never logged a minute in the NBA; hindsight is 20/20, but that draft night saw Chris Paul drop to 4, Deron Williams to 3, Channing Frye to 8, and Danny Granger to 17; Orlando wasted one of few opportunities to add legit talent.
Victor Oladipo, the team’s most promising prospect after Dwight Howard, was traded *along with the 11th pick draft rights to future All-Star Domantas Sabonis* for a half-season rental of Serge Ibaka in hopes of pushing a 9-seed at the time up to a 7-seed, which blew up immediately and failed miserably before Ibaka left a few months later, marking the worst trade in the Franchise’s history.
Jonathan Isaac, drafted as a possible defensive anchor prospect, was never able to find the right mix of weight, mobility, and strength with Orlando’s coaching staff to stay effective and available, despite showing flashes of that defensive greatness when anchoring the Magic’s 7-seeds under Clifford.
Aaron Gordon was never used as a power forward in Orlando, which about sums up just how completely Orlando misused him on the perimeter for the first half of his career, only outdone by trading him for a pu pu platter of a fake first and two lesser players who didn’t last long on the roster.
Nikola Vucevic was rarely a positive impact player in Orlando, a team that won on elite defense behind AG and JI. Only the voters know why Vooch’s PPG and RPG box score stat numbers earned him an All-Star nod on a 7-seed with a bottom-20 offense. Vooch proved to be better than the average player, winning most regular season scoring battles individually, while his team often got outscored by the other team; unfortunately, he was nowhere good enough to lead a team anywhere in games that matter, like playoff games where defense has to be played.
Orlando deeming this player to be a star worthy of building the entire around limited everyone other player’s opportunity and the team’s chances of winning basketball games for years to come. Orlando’s former 6th overall pick Mo Bamba‘s career may have not panned out any differently, as he was competing for reserve minutes with Khem Birch, but limiting Bamba’s minutes next to starters didn’t help. The Magic’s young core of Fultz-Isaac-Gordon-Bamba did not log a single minute together on the court in their entire time together in Orlando, mostly because of the idea that the entire offense revolves around playing through Vucevic, limiting lineup flexibility, chemistry, growth.
Franz Wagner has been Orlando’s most impactful player by the numbers for the past two seasons; he’s also missed half the games both years due to injuries that may have been flukes, but happened when Franz was nonetheless being relied on to do a little bit too much of everything on both sides of the ball.
With Seattle looking like the next expansion team, Magic fans can only hope history stops repeating itself, and that this time, their brightest star in Paolo Banchero chooses to stick around Orlando.
The Magic are fresh off firing the coach that built their most recent Top-5 defense in Jamahl Mosley, who took the brunt of the blame for last year’s injury-riddled season; only time will tell if Orlando ever stops chasing away prominent team figures every time they face adversity.
Maybe this time they’ll get their stars to stay around, if they ever stop running them into the ground.
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