NBA Draft 2018: Magic take Mo Bamba at No. 6
By Micah Wimmer
The Magic reportedly were interested in Trae Young, but after he was taken by the Hawks, Orlando selected Mo Bamba with the No, 6 pick.
The Orlando Magic have not been in a good place for a while now. Ever since they traded Dwight Howard six summers ago, they have yet to win more than 35 games in a season, let alone sniffed the Playoffs. They’ve had three different coaches, plus an interim, and despite having 4 picks in the top 6 from 2013-17, somehow don’t really have any players to build around. Making it worse, the best player they’ve selected since the Howard trade is no longer in Orlando, but instead earning All NBA honors in Indianapolis.
Aaron Gordon, Jonathan Isaac, and Mario Hezonja could still be very good — the oldest is Hezonja at 23 – but there’s not a ton of reason to believe they will be. Evan Fournier and Nikola Vucevic are both fine players, though no one is going to win a title with either of them as two of your best players. All of this to say is that Orlando needed a little bit of everything tonight, but more than anything else, they just need an identity, something to give shape to the disparate mass of players they’ve thoughtlessly accumulated over the last half decade.
With the selection of Mohamed Bamba, the Magic have hopefully taken a step towards a more promising future. Bamba is a very promising player, especially defensively, who projects to be a very good rim protector and excellent rebounder. The hope for the Magic is that he will become their own, younger, longer version of Rudy Gobert, but with greater offensive abilities. The biggest concern is that his offensive game will not develop very much from its present state, although if he lives up to his defensive potential, that may not matter too much as long as he can catch the occasional lob and put back offensive rebounds. The Magic still need to find players who can score reliably and make plays, but Bamba gives Orlando a much needed identity that can ideally give them a base from which to build moving forward.