Nylon Calculus: Playing real or fake with early season NBA trends
3. Orlando’s dominant starting lineup: Real or fake?
The Magic may be the most entertaining non-competitive team across the league, with an abundance of young unproven talent that can display flashes of genuine intrigue.
What will Mo Bamba do off the dribble? What super feats of athleticism will Jalen Suggs flash? Is Wendell Carter shooting 40 percent on 3s?
While these anecdotes are all too common in the esoteric Twitter circles of NBA fandom, the Magic don’t permeate the national spotlight as often as they could. And even though a playoff chase is highly unlikely for this young Orlando team, there is a hint of future potential coming from Central Florida.
The Magic’s starting group may have the most upside of any in the NBA; Mo Bamba is the elder statesman at 23 years of age and three others are in their rookie or sophomore seasons. Of course, this potential is inherently fraught with risk, namely the possibility that none of the five will become serviceable NBA starters.
For now, we should enjoy what this collection of youth has done to drag the woeful Magic to four wins on the back of some of the NBA’s best defense.
Through 341 possessions, the Magic starters have limited opponents to 0.94 points per possession, one of the league’s best mark’s among all five-man rotations, per Cleaning the Glass.
They’ve done so by both limiting opponent opportunities in transition and maintaining one of the league’s best halfcourt defensive marks. There doesn’t appear to be a specific emphasis on limiting transition opportunities, since the Magic starting group also grabs offensive rebounds at a furious rate.
These indicators are all positive, pointing to a style focused on maximizing opportunities on both ends of the floor. But there’s one detail that indicates their early success may be a mirage.
The Orlando starters have largely benefitted from poor opponent outside shooting on an incredibly heavy diet of 3-point attempts. Through 17 games, teams have shot 29 percent on 3-point attempts against this group, far below the league average rate of 35 percent.
We can expect that this will become a problem for this Orlando team, as they’re currently allowing starting groups to take 45 percent of their shots from beyond the arc. While few expected the Magic’s young core to compete, we should expect that the Magic regress to the bottom of the conference standings when opponent shots begin to fall.