With the 2018-19 NBA season beginning in earnest one month from today, it’s natural for fans across all teams to begin to wonder: “What is a reasonable expectation for our team this season?”

For some, like the Golden State Warriors, it is simple and straightforward — Championship or bust. But for teams like Orlando, it can be a pretty difficult task. The optimist in us all thinks that with fresh blood on the team and a new direction, maybe they can get it together and find themselves moving up a (very) weak eastern conference. Then you look at the roster and the missing pieces jump out at you the same way they did in previous seasons.

As the follower of a struggling team, the hope and expectations that come along with a new season can be completely intoxicating, and terribly addictive. It works like both a poison and an antidote — last year’s hope fuels the ensuing disappointment, which is remedied by a new dose of expectation.

In short, supporting a team like the Magic coming off a bad season is like deciding to buy a lottery ticket.

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Phase one: Humble Pie

“It’s just a bit of fun, I know my ticket won’t win, but what the heck!”

“Eh, we were pretty terrible last season, i just wanna see us improve in any way”

Phase two: Who Knows?

“I know the odds are 14 million to 1, but someones got to win, why not me?”

“I know last season was terrible and there are still glaring weaknesses in the team, but you never know! anything can happen!”

Phase three: Fatalism

“Maybe i was meant to walk into this store and buy this lottery ticket…Maybe this is the one…”

“Maybe we had to suck so we could pick Mo Bamba…Maybe he is the one…”

Phase four: Intoxication

“Oh god, i might win the lottery! what am i going to do with the money?”

“Oh god, we might have a deep playoff run! who would we be our best match up?”

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Both of these stories end the same way, 99.999% of the time. We don’t win the jackpot, and we don’t have a deep playoff run, but it’s the hope of that 0.001% that is just oh, so tantalizing.

Having acknowledged our own fan delirium, there are things we can look at around the eastern conference and within the Magic themselves that can help us give indicators as what to expect this upcoming season.

The Key Players



Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The main worry for Orlando fans is undeniably the backcourt. With such a lengthy frontcourt, it’s important to be able to spread the floor and hit the deep ball reasonably reliably. In the build up to the draft, the Trae Young to Orlando train seemed to be pulling in to the station, but at the very last minute he was snatched from under the apparently keen Magic front office’s nose. With that, the search for ways to improve the backcourt through free agency began, and the results were….not good. At one point, Isaiah Thomas looked on his way to the Amway Center, but the two sides couldn’t reach a deal. So, after all is said and done, the Magic come in to this season with the same problems as last year, only this time without Mario Hezonja.

DJ Augustin is not a disaster at point guard – 10 points and 4 assists a game are capable, ticking-over numbers – but this is a struggling team which needs help in finding space for its young frontcourt and scoring the basketball. Not only this but when you have players like Isaac and Bamba who will intimidate in the paint, defending the perimeter is crucial, and Augustin has never demonstrated a high level of defensive capability.

On the other half of the court, there is reason for cautious optimism. Looking up and down the roster and at the coaching staff, it’s not hard to see the identity that is attempting to be forged with this team: Length and Defense. This is best demonstrated by looking at the young front-court of Bamba, Isaac, and Gordon, or as fans are beginning to call the three of them: “BIG”. (side note: this must be read like the “EA Sports BIG” stab that came when you booted up NBA Street Vol. 2 or SSX Tricky on the PS2. This is of paramount importance.)

BIG is (are?) a preseason hype hat-trick: A still-improving, young star who’s just signed an extension, last season’s high draft pick who impressed in spurts and is coming off a hot summer league, and this years first round pick who many believe has one of the highest ceilings in the whole draft. It’s on the shoulders of these three players which any hopes of a competitive season rest, and with that comes hype and expectation.

Though early, it’s fair to say that we can expect Aaron Gordon to be the best player on the team going in to this upcoming season. Presented with this, the two questions that follow have to be “How good is Aaron Gordon?” and “How good can a team be with Aaron Gordon as it’s best player?”. These, unfortunately, are questions that can only be answered definitively with the hard, empirical evidence of actual, competitive NBA games under this new regime. However, It is nice to know that your best player is capable of taking over games like he did against the Nets last year.

Highlights from Aaron Gordon’s career high 41 point game. (@Double0AG) pic.twitter.com/5pxZcPwCeN — The Lando (@TheLando__) October 25, 2017

Isaac, meanwhile, is probably the Magic player getting the most buzz in this off-season. He looked comfortable on the floor in his rookie season despite struggling with injuries and a decidedly minor role on offense, and has backed it up with a strong showing in the summer league. His performances in Vegas this summer garnered praise from mainstream sports press like The Ringer, who posted this article which posits that Isaac “[exhibits] all the qualities of the kind of futuristic, two-way player every team covets”. How he and Gordon manage in sharing the duties of Small Forward and Power Forward is perhaps the most intriguing line-up storyline for Magic fans coming in to the season.

Then, there’s Mo Bamba. If you search for “Mo Bamba” on Google right now you are going to see a lot more of Sheck Wes wearing an orthopedic boot than you are of the Magic’s new giant center, but that is sure to change in a months time or so. A lot has been said about the importance of “the eye test” on judging NBA talent, and if Bamba continues to add size to his lengthy frame like he has already, he will draw attention based on his physical gifts alone.

Mo Bamba is evolving. THREE weeks away from Training Camp.@TheRealMoBamba pic.twitter.com/OSgEbmOQdE — The Lando (@TheLando__) September 3, 2018

Steve Clifford and the “Pulis Effect”

Outside of Mo Bamba, the biggest import for the Magic this offseason has been the hiring of Steve Clifford as their new head coach. Boy, did online fans not like this move at first, but Clifford too was a victim of the offseason fandom hype machine.

As the saying goes, the NBA is a copycat league, and when teams (and their fandoms) are down on their luck, they look at the teams that are successful and say “we must have the same set up in order to win”. So when fans see teams like Golden State or Boston, they see young, forward-thinking coaches on their first head coaching job who can seemingly do no wrong.

So, naturally, this tends to make coaching prospects like Jerry Stackhouse a much more alluring proposition to the hype machine, and when that doesn’t happen you can see why fans would begin to think that the team is moving in the wrong direction. This is, however, fallacious as we know precisely sweet diddly about how Clifford and the Magic players are going to gel over time. Sometimes coaches just naturally fit in to place and it’s like they’ve been there forever, other times it just doesn’t click, but to act like there’s no chance of it being a positive move is just not helpful. Furthermore, picking the young hotshot coach has not been a solve-all remedy (ask a Knicks fan about life under Derek Fisher).

That being said, it would be churlish to suggest that people’s only problem with the Clifford hire was that he doesn’t fit the mold of the modern young coach. Clifford’s tenure in Charlotte is difficult to condense into simply “good” or “bad” because once again, the expectations of 2013 Bobcats fans and 2018 Hornets fans changed drastically over time, due to what i would term “The Pulis Effect”.

“The Pulis Effect” (named after Tony Pulis, former Stoke City FC manager) is when a team is at – or close to – rock bottom, and gets an injection of life from a coach who guides them to relevancy, only to be dismissed when he doesn’t fit the newfound ambitions of the owners and the fans that he or she helped to create in the first place.

Clifford took the Hornets (then the Bobcats) from laughing stock of the league (and perennial “Just move them to Seattle, already” favourites) to a team that made the playoffs twice in three years. They were a sneaky fun team to watch, too. Al Jefferson even made the All-NBA Third Team!

His last two years were marred by health issues and a lack of inertia that came directly after his appointment, missing out on the playoffs two years in a row. Last year the Hornets missed out on the playoffs by seven games and questions were asked of Clifford’s selection policy and whether or not he was interested in (or capable of) developing youth products like Malik Monk.

It’s hard to label it a slam dunk hire. However, when gauging expectations for the upcoming season, the fact that Clifford has past experience in taking teams who are in a rough, rough situation and jump-starting them in short order is not one to ignore.

In his first season as Hornets coach, Clifford led a team that won 21 games the previous season to a 22-win improvement and a 7-seed in the East. The Magic are coming off a 25-57 season, their 4th season with 25-or-fewer wins since 2012-13. https://t.co/TsSerTg1rz — ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) May 30, 2018

The Eastern Conference – Where do the Magic fit?

Looking at our own squad and the coaching staff is all well and good, but they don’t exist in a bubble. The best way in my opinion to gauge expectations for the upcoming year would be to look at the competition. The eastern conference has been released from the firm clutch of LeBron James and this has left a power vacuum the likes of which we haven’t seen in years, perhaps comparable to the late 1990s which saw Shaq move to the Lakers (ouch) and Michael Jordan retire in quick succession.

The rest of the conference can be split in to 5 categories:

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Tier 1: Finals Favourites

Boston Celtics, Toronto Raptors

Tier 2: Finals Hopefuls



Philadelphia 76ers, Milwaukee Bucks, Indiana Pacers

Tier 3: Playoff Favourites



Washington Wizards, Miami Heat

Tier 4: Playoff hopefuls

Cleveland Cavaliers, Detroit Pistons, Charlotte Hornets

Tier 5: The Field

New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls, Brooklyn Nets, Atlanta Hawks

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When it’s laid out like that, there’s really only one place we can put the Magic going in to this season, and that’s in Tier 5. There are currently seven teams who you would put money on to be in the playoffs come next spring, leaving realistically one place for the rest of the conference. The Cavs, Pistons, and Hornets, who we could consider “on the cusp” of the playoffs (i.e. vying for that last spot) all finished at least ten games up on the Magic last season. That’s quite a gap.

The main saving grace, I believe, for the Magic is that the Southeastern division in particular is very weak, especially compared with a group like the Atlantic division, in which three teams fancy themselves to make a push to at least the conference finals this year. Twelve games against the Heat, Wizards, and Hornets is a much more winnable proposition than twelve games against the Celtics, Raptors, and 76ers. Meanwhile, the Atlanta Hawks look like they could be the worst team in the eastern conference for a second year in a row.

Predicting the final standings before a single ball has been tipped is a pointless endeavor, but the the simple maths of eight playoff places and 10 teams who were at least ten games better than the Magic last season is a telling indicator that an awful lot needs to fall in to place for Orlando to find themselves in the playoff picture at the end of the season.

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With all these factors in consideration, coming to a satisfying conclusion is really quite difficult. There are things to excite, for sure, but they are balanced alongside the same issues that the team faced last season. Bringing in a coach with previous experience in dragging a team by the scruff of its neck out of the mire is a good start, but even the best coaches have to have the right pieces in place for them to be able to carry out their vision effectively.

Bamba, Isaac, and Gordon are an exciting proposition, but how much will we see of them together? Will Bamba start? can Isaac stay healthy? Can Gordon continue his upward trajectory?

Could the eastern conference be even worse than we thought? Could we see teams we thought were locks for the playoffs drop way out into the draft lottery? Could the Magic pick up the pieces and climb out of the pit with their chaos ladder?

Oh god, I might win the lottery, what am i going to do with the money?