The Magic have yet to recover from losing Dwight Howard, but they’ve collected a cache of young talent and the future of the team is starting to emerge from the haze. They’ve released the last connection to their finals team, Jameer Nelson, and flipped their leading scorer for a 21 year-old shooting guard. It’s easy to make the playoffs in the east, but they’re a breakout performance or another piece away.
2014 in review
The year might have ended with a trip to the lottery, but Oladipo wasn’t far from a Rookie of the Year trophy and they were oddly effective in one area: defense. They won 23 games, but their defensive rating was just under the league average. Playoff teams the Blazers and Nets had similar ratings, and Dallas was actually worse, even after adjusting for strength of schedule. With rebounders like Vucevic and Harris, they ranked 10th in the league in defensive rebound rate, but there weren’t awful in any subset of defense — they defended shots at an above average level and were 20th in forcing turnovers. But they were horrific on offense, only ahead of the 76ers. Giving the keys to a rookie guard is partly the cause, but they lacked a significantly positive offensive force, with the possible exception of veteran point guard Jameer Nelson, and gave heavy minutes to some dreadful scorers like Glen Davis and E’Twaun Moore. On the bright side, defense is harder to teach young teams, so perhaps they can develop quicker.
Changes
Exit: Arron Afflalo, Jameer Nelson, E’Twaun Moore, Doron Lamb, Jason Maxiell, Ronnie Price, Solomon Jones, Adonis Thomas.
Enter: Channing Frye, Evan Fournier, Aaron Gordon, Ben Gordon, Luke Ridnour, Elfrid Payton, Seth Curry, Peyton Siva.
The Magic lost two starters, and probably their two best offensive players, but they have a decent set of players coming in to replace them. The other set of players the Magic lost are inconsequential — no offense to them since they made it to the highest league in the world, but they were all replaceable. Channing Frye is an odd fit on a rebuilding team — he’s already in his 30’s — and it might hint at a new philosophy. French shooting guard Fournier hasn’t shown all too much in his young career; some analysts are higher on him than others (interestingly, Orlando passed on him in the 2012 draft and took Nicholson instead.) The Gordon’s are polar opposites: Aaron Gordon, their lottery rookie, reminds people of Blake Griffin or Marion as an athletic forward; Ben Gordon is an over-the-hill, undersized shooting guard who is lucky to still be in the league. He was waived by Charlotte, and not too long ago Detroit used a first round pick just to get rid of his contract. That Ben Gordon got a 4.5 million a year from Orlando is a shock and some have argued it’s to appease agent Raymond Brothers, who also represents Oladipo. Since Orlando has plenty in cap space and there’s a team option on the second year, it’s no burden bringing him on. Finally, Ridnour will be used as the steady hand running the offense, and could see a good portion of playing time if (or when) Oladipo fails in his duties.
Player spotlight
Tobias Harris represents the fear teams have in trading their young guys before they’ve matured and we understand how good they can be. Milwaukee included him in a trade not even two years after they drafted him for J.J. Redick on an expiring deal to secure a playoff spot. Yet it seemed like a steep price to pay for a season where they only won 38 games and were a speed bump for Miami in the first round with the possibility Redick would be a short-term rental — which happened when he left for the Clippers.
Harris, meanwhile, blossomed in Orlando. From the bar chart below, you can see he’s a capable scorer with a few dimensions. His assists are low, but he has an obscenely low turnover rate that has progressively gotten better in his career. His strength, however, is his rebounding: typically stretch 4’s or combo forwards in downsized lineups hurt a team on the glass, but Harris rebounds at an above average level even for a power forward.
The downside of using a perimeter player as your power forward is that you have one less guy who can defend the rim well. Harris had a tiny rim protection FGA rate, meaning he was rarely near the basket when players shot there. Some of that is due to his time spent at SF in certain lineups, but he’s not swooping in from the weakside to block shots either. Overall, his defense is solid, but how much they use him at PF this season will be important to track.
Harris, however, is not a particularly great jump shooter and regressed on his accuracy from outside the arc. His utility going forward will depend on whether or not he can make that shot consistently enough to draw defensive attention. In fact, he’s one of few three-point shooters for whom a long two-pointer is more efficient: he’s at 0.87 points per shot on two-pointers from 16 feet and out for his career, but it falls to 0.84 points per shot on three’s. Although his combination of a healthy midrange game and a good finish rate at the rim is potent, he’ll need three-point accuracy going forward.
The field goals below are representative of his offensive game: he picks up an offensive rebound and then eventually drives past Paul George for a lay-up in the first video; he spots up for a corner three; he scores in transition on a dunk; and then he hits a floater over the outstretched arms of Hibbert. (For more clips, here’s arguably his best game of the season versus the top-tier Bulls defense.) Against traditional PFs, he uses his speed to blow past them to the basket (he does this well versus Taj Gibson in the Chicago game.) Via stats.NBA.com, over 17% of his points were coded as fast break points. Part of the reason he had a breakthrough in Orlando is that they used him as a power forward where he could capitalize on his speed, similar to another combo forward with a shaky outside shot Thaddeus Young.
For a test of Tobias’ defense, there’s a set of 13 videos below of field goals LeBron attempted versus the Magic (link is also here.) LeBron posts him up twice with different outcomes: missing once in the first video as Tobias defends him well but getting deep position in the sixth one and scoring. He has trouble navigating picks, getting stuck (10th video) behind a pick, but he stays with him fairly well around a curl in the fourth clip. He makes a mistake in the 7th clip, reaching in on a drive, which gives LeBron an opportunity to accelerate quickly to the basket with little interference. Overall, Harris got lucky LeBron missed a few easy shots, including an open catch-and-shoot three with a lot of airspace in the 9th video. (The play-by-play tab hasn’t been displaying lately, so I can’t paste separate plays; you’ll see some shots where Tobias wasn’t defending him.)
Tobias Harris has a lot of value as a smallball four due to his rebounding and quickness, but he’d need to be paired with a strong defender at center and, unfortunately, Orlando is set on a frontcourt with Vucevic and Channing Frye. For his long-term potential, his three-point shooting is paramount and should be tracked during the season if you’re looking for him to take another large step forward.
2015 projected
The Magic have started their ascent and they’re starting to crawl upwards toward the playoffs. Trading away Afflalo and Nelson may not be an admission of non-competitiveness but an effect of their organizational philosophy. Nelson is out to give way to Oladipo and possibly rookie Elfrid Payton. Afflalo’s role as lead scorer will be redistributed to youngsters like Harris, Fournier, and Gordon. Signing a veteran big man, Frye, felt odd since the team is still rebuilding, but they may have been concerned about their team’s spacing and saw the rarity in a seven-foot three-point shooter. For instance, Oladipo’s speed can be utilized better in conjunction with Frye’s picks and the threat of his shooting. Yet if the team values spacing, why did they let Afflalo go and draft Aaron Gordon?
There was some criticism of Orlando for dumping off Afflalo immediately after a near all-star campaign — I was among one of those critics — but there could be more intelligence behind this decision than most people realize. If someone like Daryl Morey of Houston made this trade it would have been clearer, but Afflalo is destroyed by advanced plus/minus metrics and Fournier rates as a better player right now by models like ESPN’s Real Plus/minus, which rates Arron at an awful -3 and Fournier near a neutral zero. One may be concerned about some unaccounted for artifact or noise in the plus/minus, but my own metric, which is based on “expanded” box score stats and not plus/minus, has him at -1.7, still significantly below average, and Fournier at -0.9. Sure, Afflalo led the team in scoring, but Orlando had a miserable offense and he only averaged 18 points a game in 35 minutes. His usage rate, which is highly valuable with my metric, was only 23, and he offered nothing else substantially besides his scoring. Thus, he received only 1.4 points on offense — above average, sure, but far from all-star material for a wing — and had one of the worst defensive ratings among starters in the league.
Afflalo still improbably has a good defensive reputation from his time in Denver. My theory is that during a high-profile series against LA and Kobe Bryant, some announcers or media members liked how he defended Kobe during a few plays and the reputation became concrete. There’s no evidence anymore he’s a great defender. He has one of the worst steal rates for a wing player, and he blocked an astoundingly tiny amount of shots: three total. Although block and steal rates don’t correlate perfectly to defense with individual defenders, one has to wonder how hard he was defending if he only came up with three blocks. If you’re contesting shots well, it’s reasonable to state that you’re going to come up with more blocks than that. It’s not an outlier either because he had 11 blocks last season. The list of players with at least 2500 minutes and three blocks or less is short and filled with tiny point guards like Stoudamire and Muggsy Bogues.
| Player | Height | Season | Blocks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arron Afflalo | 6' 5" | 2013-14 | 3 |
| Tom Van Arsdale | 6' 5" | 1974-75 | 3 |
| Tom Van Arsdale | 6' 5" | 1973-74 | 3 |
| Jeff McInnis | 6' 4" | 2004-05 | 1 |
| Joe Dumars | 6' 3" | 1996-97 | 1 |
| Joe Dumars | 6' 3" | 1989-90 | 2 |
| Randy Smith | 6' 3" | 1974-75 | 3 |
| John Lucas | 6' 3" | 1979-80 | 3 |
| Tony Parker | 6' 2" | 2010-11 | 3 |
| Mike James | 6' 2" | 2005-06 | 3 |
| Scott Skiles | 6' 1" | 1992-93 | 2 |
| D.J. Augustin | 6' 0" | 2010-11 | 3 |
| Chucky Atkins | 5' 11" | 2004-05 | 2 |
| Michael Adams | 5' 10" | 1989-90 | 3 |
| Damon Stoudamire | 5' 10" | 2004-05 | 2 |
| Calvin Murphy | 5' 9" | 1977-78 | 3 |
| Muggsy Bogues | 5' 3" | 1994-95 | 0 |
| Muggsy Bogues | 5' 3" | 1989-90 | 3 |
| Muggsy Bogues | 5' 3" | 1993-94 | 2 |
>=2500 MP, 3>= blocks
Afflalo is tied for being the tallest in that table and had the fewest steals, but Joe Dumars’ inclusion is enough to warrant skepticism that his extremely low blocks indicate poor defense. Looking further into the numbers with NBAWOWY, although the Magic were a decent defensive team, they were terrible with their most used Afflalo lineup, giving up 121 points per 100 possessions, which would have been far and away the worst in the league for a full season. Replacing Afflalo in that same lineup with Harkless, and in 72 minutes their defensive efficiency dropped to 102. I did this three other pairs of lineups with at least 100 possessions, and found a weighted average of Orlando being 6.8 points per 100 possessions worse on defense with Afflalo, which is roughly the same difference between the 2014 Bulls and the Magic. One explanation is that Afflalo was miscast as a small forward and his lithe 6′ 5″ frame was abused on defense. Out of the four pairs of lineups I looked at, his two best defensively were at shooting guard.
Breaking down Orlando’s team defensive stats with and without Afflalo, opposing teams took the same proportion of shots, but they turned the ball over 3 fewer times per 100 possessions when Afflalo played and shot 2 points better on true-shooting percentage. (Oddly, Orlando rebounded better with him.) Overall, the team defended like the Utah Jazz when Afflalo was on the court, and like a top ten team without him. That is the crux of why he rates low overall and a similar pattern holds for 2013.
Additionally, Orlando barely missed a beat on offense without him, and that’s a distressing sign for a scorer whose teammates lacked offensive skill. Even if his poor defensive plus/minus is contingent on him playing out of position sometimes, the Magic will be better served with him gone from small forward. Perhaps the front office realized how deceptively poor Afflalo was for them, and with Aaron Gordon at small forward and Oladipo requiring at least some time at shooting guard he would have been squeezed out anyway.
Edit: adjustments made for Oladipo’s injury. He’s out indefinitely with a facial fracture.
Summary
With the new pieces and young players to mix, the season will be a bit of an experiment. Aaron Gordon and Harris will be tried at both forward positions, and it remains to be seen if they provide enough outside shooting on offense. But they also have a couple of three-point shooting big men, Frye and Nicholson, and Vucevic’s role could change. Oladipo and Fournier are the proposed backcourt of the future where Oladipo will be the primary ballhandler with Fournier helping by defending a few point guards. The team could be based on strong defense from their perimeter guys like Oladipo and Gordon, but they can also play a rare five-out basketball lineup (all three-point shooters) that’s strong defensively and on the boards too. The potential of this core, this iteration of the Magic, could be decided this year. Orlando, in fact, is a bit of a sleeper for the 8th pick given how overrated Afflalo appears to be and how well Frye could mesh with their young guys, but they’ll likely finish in the mid-lottery range.
Wins: 29
Losses: 53
Conference rank: 12th
League offense rank: 29th
League defense rank: 13th
Edited 10/27/14
