Victor Oladipo has always been one of those guys people said should be better than he is. Drafted to the Orlando Magic with the second overall pick, there was a lot of hype surrounding him, with hopes he would be the next face of the franchise. Every mention of Oladipo early in his career was accompanied with “When he makes the jump,” but the jump never came. Oladipo struggled to fit in on the roster the Magic had put together — a severe lack of shooting left him without spacing and the coaches he worked with usually tasked him with creating a large majority of the offense.
The result was a Magic group that was much better with Oladipo on the bench than they were with him on the floor.
Last season, in lineups that played 80 minutes or more, there was only one lineup featuring Oladipo with a positive net rating. The reasons for this were sporadic with some being a drop in defense, offense, or just a complete and total disaster across the board. There was one consistency across them all, however, which was the Magic were an improved team when these lineups didn’t have Oladipo. But when looking at Oladipo’s individual on/off numbers, he appears to have improved the team as a whole.
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This is telling that Oladipo was a good player in a bad fit. There were always flashes of what could have been throughout his tenure in Orlando, but Oladipo was never able to put it together and the Magic ended up deciding to trade him on draft night for Serge Ibaka.
It turns out maybe the Magic should have kept Oladipo for one more year, or perhaps he just needed a change of scenery because the jump everybody has been waiting for may finally be happening. He’s not quite the superstar player Orlando was hoping for, but the most noticeable improvements of his career are beginning to show on a nightly basis. No longer tasked with carrying an entire offense, Oladipo is able to focus less on creating and more on taking advantage of a defense focused elsewhere. He’s still shooting just as many times this season as he was in Orlando, but there’s more of a purpose to it. It doesn’t feel like pointless chucking anymore.
His shot selection has definitely changed for the better thanks to the spacing Billy Donovan’s offense has created. Mid-range attempts have been redistributed to 3-point shooting, and the amount of attempts he’s taken from deep this season is almost half last season’s total. None of this would matter if Oladipo’s shots weren’t falling, but right now he’s shooting a career-high 38 percent from 3-point range.
The biggest weakness of Oladipo’s game in Orlando was always his 3-point shooting. He could never become enough of a threat from distance to force defenses to adjust, and his role was so heavily focused on having the ball in his hands that he found himself mainly shooting from inside the arc. Now, with Russell Westbrook sucking up much of the attention, Oladipo is able to attack defenses in different ways. He rarely shot corner 3s in Orlando, but he’s basically automatic from there with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
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The new environment has done wonders in setting him up to succeed, and the improvements everybody was waiting for him to make in Orlando are finally happening elsewhere.