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Magic Season Preview: Same Team, New Coach, New Attitude?
Photo credit: Deuce Bowers
The Orlando Magic plans to “run it back” this season, but with a new head coach and a new attitude. For this season preview, we bring you Sean Sweeney, brought to Orlando to shake the doldrums from a team that has lost in the first round of the playoffs the past three seasons.
“We want to be a team that’s got freak competitiveness, connected, and then great toughness.” Sweeney told Pulp City Magazine on the team’s media day, adding “there’s a lot to be excited about.” Try telling that to a fan base that has seen the team flame out spectacularly over the past 3 years, including the playoff meltdown against the Detroit Pistons where the Magic led three games to one in the best of seven, then blew a 24-point second-half lead to those Pistons in Game 6. It was so bad, Guard Jalen Suggs apologized to the fans, speaking to Brandon Kravitz on 740 The Game. Suggs has moved on. “Ain’t no reason to hold on to anything that happened in the past,” he said at media day, ready to do what his new Coach asks of him. “I’ve been working on my handle. I’ve been working on my decision-making.”
Coach Sweeney will need better decision-making and shooting from Suggs, and for the entire team plus the fans to buy in on his direct to the point style. He chose the job because of the talent and is already learning about how they act. “This group is a high character group” Sweeney claims. “We’ve already started finding out who we are”.
Anywhere the Magic wants to go starts with Paolo Banchero, who is promising more urgency this year. “I think our organization will be better in terms of our team and how we go out there and play every night.” His goal: to dominate every night. “I think we’ll be a lot more intense out there on both sides of the ball and a lot more together as well.” To do that and reach his goal of winning the Eastern Conference, Banchero will have to stay healthy. Last season he missed 10 games, and 36 the season before. He looks ready to go, and sports shorter hair this year. No more dreds, it’s now the same look he had at Duke. Coach Sweeney visited him in Seattle after taking the job and walked away impressed. “I got to know how much he really wants to win; how great he wants to be, and that’s exciting.”
Franz Wagner will also need to stay healthy. He is already nursing a sore shoulder as opening night approaches. “I think we have so many levels that we can get to,” Franz told Pulp City Magazine. He no longer has brother Moritz to lean on and will have to improve his outside shooting. Guard Desmond Bane now enters his second season with the team, claiming I was missing something by just looking at a roster reading almost exactly the same way it was at the end of another first round playoff loss. “Everything will be different,” Bane told me at media day, saying this team can be special. “We have to act like it on a daily basis in order to have a chance. I’m looking forward to the challenge.” Bane was the team’s rock last season, playing in all 82 games. The Magic return all five starters from last year, and it’s top options off the bench. The only thing that’s new is old. Six years after being traded Nic Vucevic returns to Orlando, this time as the backup center to Wendell Carter Jr. The Magic are hoping he can provide outside shooting and veteran leadership.
How far the Magic can go in an improved Eastern Conference depends on Coach Sean Sweeney injecting new ideas and energy into a team that just has not been able to get over the hump. What he’s telling Jalen Suggs, and what Suggs in telling us seem prophetic. “Can we be locked in every single day and not get too far outside of ourselves and have these big spikes up or down? Can we stay a bit more steady? I think those two go hand in hand, and I think being more consistent will help me be more efficient.”
