Orlando Magic, 14th Eastern Conference: 2012-2013 was a pretty good season for the Magic considering what happened. They were forced to trade away the best centre in the league in Dwight Howard, fired their head coach Stan Van Gundy and basically had to start off on a whole new foot without what seemed any early draft picks or promising youngsters to start the season. Boy did that quickly change, Nikola Vucevic turned out to be a double double machine last year. Andrew Nicolson turned out to be handy a real contributor and traded for rookie Maurice Harkless made a huge leap after the all-star break averaging 13 points, 5 rebounds and a steal and a block a game. Add this to the ridiculous break out of Tobias Harris and the team looks like it’s in good shape. Oh and I forgot to mention, they had the number 2 draft pick in the most recent draft and arguably picked the best player out of them all. What they have going for them: What the magic have going for them is they have a bunch of promising young rookies who are all capable of being something special with just a little bit of work. Tobias Harris looks like he could average 18 - 20 this year and Victor Oladipo can put up points in a bunch as well. You still have solid vets on top of the rookies in Aaron Affalo, Jameer Nelson and Big Baby Davis. It’ll be hard for teams to predict who will be the go to guy in the first half of the season giving the Magic a slight edge. They’re young athletic legs will also be a huge factor giving them many fast break points, what they need to upset the opponent. What they don’t have going for them: Well despite Nikola Vucevic being a double double machine, he is really poor on the defensive end, always letting the opposing centres dominate the game. Jameer Nelson isn’t really the type of point guard to turn youngsters into superstars as well and his presence could be bad considering he will be getting most of the minutes at the point guard spot, apparently a spot Victor will someday fill. They also don’t have room for Victor to do his thing because Affalo is in the 2 guard spot for atleast 30 minutes a night and despite Harkless and Affalo they don’t really have many defensive players to rely on. I expect this team to one of the worst in the league because they really have a lot of unknowns at this point. Hopefully they can transform into quality players. What to expect: Well the Magic don’t look like they will be making the playoffs this year (or for a few years to add onto that) so the main point will to be develop the rookies as best as they can, bit hard to do with two starting calibar players filled in at the 1 and 2 spot and although Jameer and Affalo are terrific teammates, it would be totally disrespectful to them to not give them atleast 30 minutes a night because they deserve it,. However this might be something something the Magic might not want to do which could cause some friction within the team. Regardless though though if there young players keep developing like they did last year then I totally expect them to be back in the playoffs by 2016.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 11:36:17 +0000
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