Team building in the NBA is very difficult.
Consider the Orlando Magic. They have patient, deep-pocketed ownership, smart and experienced management with an eye on the big picture and loads of high-end talent.
They sold off an underwhelming core at the right time and turned the draft capital into one of the best young forwards in the game in Franz Wagner, taken eighth overall in 2021 with one of the picks they got from the Chicago Bulls. They tanked briefly but effectively and ended up with Jalen Suggs, taken No. 5 in 2021, and Paolo Banchero, taken first overall in 2022. Banchero became an all-star in his second season at age 21, and Suggs was all-defence in his third season at 22.
Having made the playoffs two years in a row, the Magic then went for it and cashed in some draft capital (as in four unprotected first-round picks and a pick swap) for Desmond Bane, a tough, two-way wing to bolster their biggest weaknesses: shot creation and three-point shooting.
He’s played well this season.
There are more good moves — drafting up-and-coming Anthony Black in the lottery in 2023 and Tristan Da Silva in 2024. Both look like long-term rotation players.
But sometimes things just don’t come together. For the Magic, it’s been most of this snake-bitten season, but it may have culminated Sunday evening at Scotiabank Arena.
In a game with significant Eastern Conference playoff implications, the Magic looked like a team fiddling through the pre-season.
The Raptors’ 139-87 win doesn’t quite capture the Magic’s capitulation. Over a nearly eight-minute stretch in the first half, the Raptors scored 31 unanswered points, an NBA record for the play-by-play era (since the 1996-97 season, roughly 30 years).
“I actually didn’t know that that was even happening,” said Scottie Barnes, who set a new career-high with 15 assists to go along with 23 points and three steals in 28 minutes. His three steals gave him a career-best 102 on the season, and along with his 109 blocks, make him the only player in the NBA to top 100 of each so far this year. “I think we were all super locked in. Just trying to keep causing turnovers and keep trying as hard as we can on defence that it just helped the lead grow for us.”
Orlando gave up 19 turnovers in the first half, which the Raptors turned into 30 points. It was the second-most turnovers in a half for which there are available statistics. Toronto led 70-43 at halftime.
The Raptors were their typically handsy, pesky selves as they made a season-high 18 steals, but on multiple occasions, the Magic simply made careless passes out of bounds or over their teammates’ heads or through a forest of arms and legs.
The result was ugly. The 52-point winning margin was the second-largest in Raptors history.
The whole thing was a little weird. For the second time in a month Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic credited a higher power, for his team’s performance, which was one way to explain how his team played their most dominant basketball of the season with Brandon Ingram (heel inflammation), Immanuel Quickley (missed his fourth straight game with plantar fasciitis) and Colin Murray-Boyles (back spasms) all out of the lineup. Jamison Battle (illness) was out, too.
But who can the Magic blame? Orlando Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley tried to shoulder the blame, but he’s not passing the ball to the other team.
To their credit, against some adversity, the Raptors rallied.
“Obviously we dealt with several injuries today and I felt in the locker room before the start of the game there was a lot of determination there. The guys really wanted to go out there and compete,” Rajakovic said.
What was the Magic’s excuse? It’s hard to fathom.
The game represented arguably Orlando’s last best chance to pull itself into contention for a top-six finish and a guaranteed playoff spot in the East. It would have given the Magic a 2-1 edge in the season series with the Raptors and pulled them within one game of Toronto.
Now it’s the Raptors that have the tiebreak, and they are three full games ahead of eighth-place Orlando (39-35) with eight to play. Toronto still has a fight on its hands to stay in the top six. They are 42-32 and a half game up on Atlanta in sixth and one game up on Philadelphia in seventh. But if they slip back into the play-in tournament, it likely won’t be due to the Magic.
The Raptors aren’t a perfectly constructed team. What would Barnes be able to do if he actually could be something close to a full-time point guard, surrounded by shooters who can stretch the floor in every direction? We’ve never been able to see it in Toronto. Even after converting 13-of-29 threes against Orlando, the Raptors are 25th in made threes this season and 23rd in three-point percentage.
But put the ball in his hands and good things happen. Barnes has 49 assists in the last four games, third in the NBA over that span.
The Raptors do have a collective energy that, for the most part this season, has made them better than the sum of their parts.
It’s allowed a previously unproven Sandro Mamukelashvili to take his first shot at regular playing time and thrive as the first big off the bench. He was +47 on Sunday and finished with 19 points on 13 shots.
It’s there when RJ Barrett battles through a shoulder injury to put up 24 points on 8-of-14 shooting. It’s there when Alijah Martin and A.J. Lawson, the Raptors’ little-used two-way contract players, step into a crucial game and contribute 22 points on 8-of-13 shooting combined.
Injuries are a huge part of the Magic’s story: their core of Wagner, Banchero, Suggs and Bane have played just 130 minutes together this season. They are +10.1 per 100 possessions when they do.
But if the flesh is weak, the spirit doesn’t seem much better.
They were only missing Wagner on Sunday and they completely no-showed. It was their seventh loss in eight games, their only win coming over the lowly Sacramento Kings.
The Raptors haven’t done everything right over the past three years. A talent sell-off and four years out of the playoffs have hardly yielded a bucket full of top lottery picks. Who the future star is that will ride alongside Barnes is still very much to be determined.
But they have played together and they have committed to playing a high-energy style of defence. They pass the ball.
They have a very good chance at making the playoffs; teams a lot further along the talent acquisition curve — the Magic just being one of them — are in danger of missing them.
Credit where credit is due.
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Georgia on their minds: Mamukelashvili and Orlando Magic centre Goga Bitadze had a lengthy catch-up at centre court before the game started. The two big men are the only Georgian players in the NBA and represented the national team this past summer at EuroBasket. They have known each other forever. “Me and Goga played each other when I was like, six or seven years old, and he was tall and he was the only person able to block my shot and I really hated it. I was thinking, ‘Who is this tall guy?’ I was the tallest and he was the tallest. He was always a physically gifted and strong guy. I feel like he was the first player or second player against who I really had to adjust. [But] I’m so happy for him and hopefully he gets better. But I’m super happy to play him and I think he’s representing the country amazingly.”
To dunk or not do dunk: When you’re six-foot-one, dunking can be stressful. The outcome is not guaranteed. But every once in a while, Jamal Shead (12 points, 10 assists, three steals) will decide it’s time. “Whenever I’m actually open, I’ll try,” said Shead. “I need the time to get my legs under me. I don’t like dunking. It’s scary. It’s a long way for me.” But the stars aligned early in the fourth quarter with the Raptors leading by 51 points. Shead shot the gap, was off on a breakaway and loaded up. It was his third dunk of the season (on three attempts) and the sixth of his career (on nine attempts).
Yes, they follow the standings: “I think everyone goes home and checks it,” said Mamukelashvili. “We’re right there. We fought through the whole year to kind of get ourselves in a good position. We slipped up, we came back. Now we know that everything is so stacked, the margin of error is so small, I feel you got to be aware of it. I watch other games, Miami, Orlando, Atlanta — all the teams that are right there with us, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and make sure we stay on top.”
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