Did the Orlando Magic's tough season make them stronger? We'll find out soon

New York Times

18-04-2025

ORLANDO, Fla. — After they won 47 games and nearly won a first-round playoff series last year, Orlando Magic players expected their ascension to continue throughout the 2024-25 season.
Instead, they endured unrelenting adversity.
Injuries mounted. Paolo Banchero, their emerging star, missed two months because of a torn oblique muscle. Franz Wagner, who played like an All-Star during Banchero's absence, sat out 26 consecutive games with an oblique tear. Sixth Man of the Year candidate Moe Wagner suffered a season-ending ACL rupture. Jalen Suggs missed over half the season, first with a back injury, then with a season-ending cartilage tear in his knee.
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The offense often struggled. As people shuffled in and out of coach Jamahl Mosley's playing rotation, Orlando suffered one of its worst outside-shooting seasons in recent history. The Magic made only 31.8 percent of their 3-point attempts, the worst accuracy rate by an NBA team in nearly a decade. They finished the regular season ranked 27th out of 30 teams in points scored per possession. The offensive woes have weighed heavily on almost everyone, including Banchero.
'The tough part is that when the offense is struggling, I think people are going to more look at me and Franz as maybe the reason,' Banchero told The Athletic. 'So we have to try and figure out ways to keep the ball moving and be efficient despite some of the struggles we've had throughout the year and injuries and stuff. But I think it's going to make us better in the end.'
The test of Banchero's hypothesis — that Orlando will solve its offensive woes and emerge better for it — will occur over the next week or so. And what a difficult test it will be. The Magic have drawn the defending champion Boston Celtics in the playoffs' first round, with Game 1 scheduled for Sunday at TD Garden. Much has been made about how the Celtics love to launch 3s, setting an NBA single-season record by attempting 48.2 treys per game, but one of the Celtics' greatest strengths is their defense.
'It's a great opportunity to see and play against the best team in the league,' Mosley said. 'They're the champs still, until somebody beats them.'
Mosley is quick to point out that Orlando's offense has played better in recent weeks, and that's true. Since a March 16 road victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Magic won 10 of their last 14 regular-season games and sank 36.3 percent of their 3-point tries in the process. Players, coaches and team officials point to that stretch as a sign of progress, and as a sign of what the Magic can accomplish.
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But there are warning signs, too. Although Orlando won its Eastern Conference Play-In game on Tuesday over Atlanta in a 120-95 rout, that matchup was closer than the final score indicates. The Magic opened the third quarter shooting 4 of 15 from the field, and the offense sputtered so badly that players looked tight. Only a stretch of excellent shot making by reserve guard Cole Anthony finally snapped the team out of its doldrums.
The Magic offense relies heavily on Banchero and Wagner as primary ballhandlers and initiators, with their teammates setting screens to give Banchero and Wagner mismatches to exploit. Then, it's often left to Banchero and Wagner to penetrate and make the right play, either to attack the basket or hurl the basketball to a teammate on the perimeter.
It can — and often does — look clunky and unimaginative, especially when compared to teams that rely on ball movement and employ several ballhandlers at any given time.
The struggles have been a source of frustration for everyone, even for Banchero's mom, Rhonda, who was a star frontcourt player at the University of Washington and whose professional career included a stint with the WNBA's Sacramento Monarchs.
On March 2, after the Magic lost at home to the tanking Toronto Raptors, she tweeted: 'If you don't have a plan, they don't know what to execute. No anticipation, spotty energy, no synergy. Just randomness all over.' In another tweet, she added: 'If roles are undefined, everyone thinks they can play the lead character.'
Asked recently about those tweets, Mosley said they did not cause friction between him and Paolo Banchero.
'I think as a mother, as a fan, as a basketball mind, you understand the thoughts and you see here's what was observed,' Mosley told The Athletic. 'So you welcome those things because people are going to have opinions, good, bad — whether they're a mom, whether they're a fan, whether they're a coach, whether they're (in the) front office. Everyone's going to have something to say, and you welcome the dialogue because you have to look in the mirror and say, 'Are we doing everything that we need to do for us this team to perform at its highest level?''
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Paolo Banchero said he and Mosley did not discuss his mother's comments, in part because he and Mosley speak constantly about how the team is performing and about how the team can improve.
'My mother, she has her own opinions,' Banchero said. 'If anyone follows her on any of her social media, she's very opinionated and she has the right, I would say, because she played the game at a very high level. She coached and played pro, and so she's going to call things how she sees it. She has her own views and own opinions. I did see the tweet and I just was like, 'All right, Mom. You know what happens when you tweet something like that, right?' And so she was understanding, but I think she was just speaking her mind in the heat of the moment at the time.'
It occurred during a difficult stretch. The Magic wound up also losing their next two games, falling again at home to the Raptors and losing at home to the Chicago Bulls. The defeats extended their losing streak to five games, and the team dropped to 29-35.
Making matters worse was that Suggs' persistent knee discomfort had been diagnosed as a cartilage tear that would require surgery and would prevent him from playing in any playoff games.
That news about Suggs, according to center Wendell Carter Jr., was the Magic's lowest point of the season.
'When J went down, I think it kind of broke our team a bit,' Carter said. 'A lot of guys inside the locker room and outside believe J is one of the hearts-and-soul of this team. He plays so hard every single night. It took a toll on us. We started dropping some games.
'It got to the point where we were ninth or 10th in the East, and the expectations from the outside looking in started to change a little bit, not believing in us, not believing in what we could do with the guys we have. So, it was a moment where everyone had to look in the mirror and just figure out what they could do to help this team win. I think we did a really good job of that after hitting that crazy low point.'
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The Magic ended their losing streak on March 8 in Milwaukee, despite a 37-point performance by Giannis Antetokounmpo. About a week later, they defeated the East-leading Cavaliers in Cleveland, 108-103; the victory at Rocket Arena was especially important because the Magic lost all four of their road playoff games there last spring.
In terms of process, Orlando's offense typically does better than it's given credit for. During the regular season, the Magic ranked 16th leaguewide in the number of 3-pointers attempted when the closest defender was at least 6 feet away, averaging 18.8 of those attempts per game. There's just one problem, and it's a doozy: The Magic made only 35.1 percent of those wide-open attempts, which was the worst figure in the league.
Since the March 16 win in Cleveland, however, the Magic have made 46.1 percent of their wide-open 3-point attempts, the NBA's third-highest percentage during that span.
'Obviously, people keep talking about the year it has been, with the numbers not being high,' Mosley said. 'But, as you look, we've been trending upwards. We love the looks we're getting because of what we're generating. If we weren't generating (those looks), then I'd have a problem with it. But these guys are generating the right shots, the right looks, and they're continuing to step in with a level of confidence just to keep on shooting them.'
The games ahead will test Orlando's mojo. Its physical defense, which finished the regular season second leaguewide in points allowed per possession, could give even Boston problems. Now's the time to prove Banchero's theory that all of the season's tough times ultimately will make the Magic a better team.
'Obviously, we would've loved not to go on those losing streaks,' Wagner said. 'But that's just kind of how this year went and hopefully that can help us out in these really important games coming up.'
(Top photo of Paolo Banchero: Nathan Ray Seebeck / Imagn Images)