ORLANDO, Fla. — The Orlando Magic’s latest gut-punch loss ended appropriately enough Thursday night, with one of their players missing a wide-open 3-pointer that would have won the game.
Paolo Banchero, their franchise cornerstone, hoisted the shot, releasing the ball from the right wing before Chicago Bulls guard Tre Jones, a much smaller player standing several feet away, even raised his hands to contest the attempt.
The basketball clanked off the rim. Although Magic center Wendell Carter Jr. collected the offensive rebound, the final buzzer sounded before Carter dunked the ball. The result: a painful 125-123 loss to the injury-ravaged Bulls, and more of the Magic’s mojo and confidence going down the drain.
Orlando’s storybook 2023-24 season, in which it finished with the Eastern Conference’s fifth-best record and extended the Cleveland Cavaliers to seven games in a first-round playoff series, offers little consolation now. Banchero and his teammates have lost five consecutive games, all at home, turning a season that opened with promise and high expectations into a terrible disappointment.
“It’s a different year,” Banchero said calmly in Orlando’s postgame locker room. “It’s almost the end of this season, so we’re a different team. Teams, I think, are seeing what our weaknesses are and they’re attacking it, and we’ve had trouble adjusting.”
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Two themes have dominated the Magic’s season: injuries and horrid 3-point shooting. Banchero, Franz Wagner and Jalen Suggs have missed extensive stretches, having played a not-so-grand total of just 97 minutes together. Suggs, who underwent arthroscopic knee surgery this week, will miss the rest of the regular season and the entire postseason.
Probably the entire NBA world regards Banchero and Wagner as Orlando’s best all-around players, but you could make a valid argument that Suggs may be the team’s most irreplaceable member.
On Jan. 3, even though Banchero had missed almost the entire season and Wagner had missed nearly an entire month, the Magic owned a 21-15 record and held a firm grip on fourth place in the conference. But Suggs injured his back that night, forcing him to sit out the next 10 games. In the game that he returned, he suffered the knee injury that ended his season.
In games that Suggs played this season, the Magic posted a 20-15 record.
Without him, they’ve gone 9-20.
Thursday’s game against the Bulls again proved how valuable Suggs is. Bulls guard Coby White tormented the Magic, scoring a career-high 44 points on layups or on 3s from the wings. No one on the Orlando roster, it seemed, could prevent White from speeding his way to the rim.
The Magic also have been unable to find a suitable replacement for sixth man Moe Wagner, a fiery center who could be counted on for nearly 13 points per game and, just as important, a level of energy for the second unit comparable to the energy that Suggs brought to the first unit. Orlando’s other big men — Carter, Goga Bitadze and Jonathan Isaac — do not provide the consistent, easy offense or crowd-igniting bursts of emotion that Wagner generated almost every game.
When this season began, it would have been difficult to believe that Moe Wagner would lead the team in 3-point shooting percentage, but that is what has happened. Wagner was shooting 36 percent from beyond the arc before his injury. As a team, the Magic have made only 30.6 percent of their 3s, the worst single-season mark since the 2012-13 Minnesota Timberwolves sank only 30.5 percent of their 3-point attempts.
On Thursday, Orlando made only nine of its 33 attempts, going 27.3 percent from deep against Chicago, culminating in Banchero’s miss just before the final buzzer.
With all that shooting trouble, it should be no surprise that opposing defenses pack the paint so tightly that it leaves precious little room for Banchero and Franz Wagner to drive to the basket. Banchero and Wagner often drive anyway, resulting in high-difficulty attempts. The only saving grace is that Banchero excels at drawing shooting fouls.
The loss to the Bulls completed a seven-game homestand that Magic coaches and players had pegged as their best opportunity yet to claw their way back to a top-six seed in the East. But the opposite occurred. The Magic lost six of the seven games, with the only victory coming against the lowly Washington Wizards.
If there is a bright side, it’s that the Magic lost five of the games — one apiece to the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and Bulls and twice to the Toronto Raptors — by a grand total of 12 points. Orlando outplayed Golden State, but Stephen Curry played one of his signature games, scoring a season-high 56 points fueled by a barrage of 3s.
“The message at the end was we’ve got to fight our way out of this funk,” coach Jamahl Mosley said. “That’s exactly what it is. It’s a funk, and we’ve got to fight our way out of it.”
It will be a tough go. On Saturday, the Magic will begin a five-game stretch of road games in which they’ll face the Milwaukee Bucks, Houston Rockets, New Orleans Pelicans, Timberwolves and Cavaliers.
“We’ve had a few now that we could have won where we tricked it off at the end,” point guard Cole Anthony said. “It’s on us. It’s in our control. We’ve just got to start with one (win).”
Since the start of last season, the Magic almost always played like more than the sum of their parts. But not anymore. The team is reeling — reeling from its five-game losing streak, from the absences of Suggs and Moe Wagner and, most probably, from its near-constant shooting woes.
“I think the confidence is low,” Banchero said.
(Photo of Paolo Banchero: Nathan Ray Seebeck / Imagn Images)
