Not being interested in an exhibition game without Isaac and Fultz is understandable.
However, there is some truth to your ambivalence. I often think the ceiling of this team remains low.
The "future of the franchise":
- Jonathan Isaac: missed over 40% of games over his first 3 seasons
- Markelle Fultz: missed his first 2 seasons due to TOS; may or may not ever learn to shoot
- Mo Bamba: has been limited to 16 and 14 mpg in his first 2 seasons
- Chuma Okeke: redshirted due to an ACL tear
Isaac and Fultz are kind of the only hopes for a future, but they come with their own question marks. Fultz still struggles to shoot from beyond the arc. Isaac might be all-NBA defense one day, but he's not someone who can carry an NBA offense and has an injury history.
The Magic have a bunch of players that good to build with but not a single player to build around. And after all those years "rebuilding" not having much to show for it is a disappointment. Some of it is their own undoing during the Hennigan era. And a lot of it is poor luck too.
Bleacher Report just did a story on the relevance of the Magic in the NBA landscape.
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2900927-a-basketball-showcase-in-nba-purgatoryWeltman and Hammond were inheriting a roster plagued with holes. Some of them were of the previous regime's doing—the Magic had spent two years fruitlessly chasing a low playoff seed—and others were, more than anything else, the consequence of poor luck.
Victor Oladipo, who the Magic drafted second overall in 2013, waited five seasons and two trades to blossom into an All-Star in Indiana. In 2015, the Magic had hoped to grab a Latvian teenager named Kristaps Porzingis with the draft's fifth pick, only to see the Knicks snag him at No. 4.
"Think of it like this," says a former Magic executive. "When you're building through the draft, there are two things where you need luck more than anything else: in winning the lottery, and in winning the lottery in a year when there's a transformational talent."
And others have noticed how little the front office have really done in their 3 seasons here.
"They've basically taken the default position on their roster," a Western Conference executive says. "They have not been aggressive in searching for chips. From a rebuilding standpoint, they've really done the bare minimum."
The lack of turnover, combined with some internal growth and Clifford's smarts, did allow the Magic to end their playoff drought last season. And, unless things go awry during the seeding games once the NBA restarts July 30, Weltman and Co. will soon have a second playoff berth added to their Orlando resume. But at 30-35, the Magic are in the worst place you can be in the NBA: the middle. They're far from a contender but also not bad enough to chase stars in the lottery.
Over the past decade or so, they've become irrelevant to the larger NBA story, more defined by embarrassing stories like last week's layoffs than by anything that's happened on the court. We're at the point where it takes the combination of a worldwide pandemic and a Disney World bubble for Orlando to rate on a national NBA scale.
Vucevic is a nice player but not a franchise cornerstone. Weltman and Hammond have made two lottery picks since coming in; one of them, Mo Bamba, has looked shaky through two seasons. Meanwhile, marquee free agents haven't seriously considered the Magic for at least a decade.
One scary thing this Bleacher Report article touches on is how much the Magic have invested in Markelle Fultz. It's made out to seem that they're believing that he's their ticket to prominence again, and I'm still kind of skeptical on that ever being the case. I enjoy watching Fultz play and I'm rooting for him, but it's hard to talk me into him and Isaac raising the ceiling of the team to one of an NBA contender.
"The way that we view him is he just completed his rookie season," Weltman says. "He's played more basketball this year than he's played combined for his other seasons in the NBA, and you know, we feel he's just beginning to scratch the surface."
"They think he's the answer," a rival executive says.
I hope there's more of a plan. Stars run the NBA. You're not excited because the Magic don't have any.