Orlando Magic are building through redundant talent

Feb 9, 2014; Orlando, FL, USA; Orlando Magic small forward Tobias Harris (12), shooting guard Victor Oladipo (5) and teammates high five against the Indiana Pacers during the second half at Amway Center. Orlando Magic defeated the Indiana Pacers 93-92. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Every year going into my annual fantasy football draft, I saunter in with spreadsheets, value-based rankings, sleepers, the usual assortment of favorite players. Somehow, without fail, I end up clicking around my queue like a chicken with its head cut off by Round Two. It’s a complete joke. I end up with a C.J. Spiller in the second round because I remember seeing the name in some throwaway Rotoworld article a month ago. This is not to say that’s how basketball teams are constructed. It’s the total opposite.

General managers and owners have a million more weapons at their scouting and preparation disposal. Instead of a draft to assemble every last piece of a team, there’s free agency, developmental leagues and in-season maneuvering. The Orlando Magic have seemed to eschew the conventional wisdom in that a team has to draft for either superstar talent or need. Instead, the Magic has drafted and traded for parts that are supplemental at best, and ill-fitting at worst. They’re not going into drafts blind, but the roster construction here seems more band-aid worthy than preconceived.

Evan Fournier is a decent pickup since there was nothing on the market, surprisingly, for Arron Afflalo. Considering the Magic were apparently willing to toss in a number one draft pick and Afflalo for Harrison Barnes’ unrealized “potential”, this makes the entire process a tad questionable. Tobias Harris, Maurice Harkless, Victor Oladipo, and Nikola Vucevic make up the rest of the core before the draft. All have the chance, to varying degrees, to become legitimate NBA starters or rotation players. It isn’t a bad core, per se, considering what they had to take for Dwight Howard and how bad last year’s draft will become.

The Magic shot 35.3 percent from distance as a team, ranked 10th last in the entire league. Taking away the departed Jameer Nelson and Afflalo, the Magic won’t have a single player that averaged even three three-point attempts per game. Oladipo averaged 2.8 threes per but only hit on 32.7 percent of them. Then in 2014 NBA Draft, in need of either a transcendent offensive player to anchor the team’s struggling perimeter game or a defensive presence down low, the Magic bucked conventional mock drafts and selected Aaron Gordon and traded for Elfrid Payton in the lottery. Selecting two athletic marvels and potential lockdown defenders at their respective positions isn’t all that awful in a vacuum. It’s less a need-based selection than placing a value on their talent and gauging it against how bad the team is in the first place. It appears as if Magic management believes they can stall on shooting, in a league that progressively towards players who aren’t stars that should either play defense and shoot threes, until they assemble enough quality players and assets.

The Magic are hoping Oladipo, Harris, Payton, and Gordon find jumpers a la Kawhi Leonard and, an extreme example here, LeBron James. If they even hit on a few out of their core eight or so, the sheer talent and athleticism are seemingly worthy cases for minutes. While that may take years, the papering over these flaws with veteran and proven shooters is an easy fix, if only for the present. Either that or there was nobody they really liked, especially after the loss of upside big man Noah Vonleh and sweet shooter Nik Stauskas. So in free agency, they aggressively paid for the services of Ben Gordon and Channing Frye, no doubt hoping the proven commodities of each to rain threes from downtown to mask the deficiencies with which their talented, albeit extremely raw youngsters provide.

The contracts aren’t preventing the team from making a splash somewhere, however rare it may become. It’s just that there’s a lot of internal trust needed to develop and/or recognize talent from an external area. Without a San Antonio or Dallas-esque system in place, the core is stuck in-between hovering around faux-contender in a weak conference and a likely lottery team.

Every team has a different way to construct what they feel is a contender. The Detroit Pistons signed Josh Smith and Brandon Jennings to roll with Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond and somehow exploded into a bigger tire fire than we imagined. The Phoenix Suns rebuilt their roster for the lottery but stumbled upon a collection of career years and excellent coaching. The Orlando Magic are drafting based on talent and trying to control the developmental variables that are ostensibly containable. However it works out, it’s a bit different from convention and there’s a bit of fun in that.

Statistical support for this piece provided by NBA.com, unless stated otherwise.