Post#38 » by Magic_Kingdom » Tue Jan 5, 2021 9:06 pm
Beneath the fool's gold of barely making the playoffs, their seats should be very hot.
1) The Magic have the 8th-highest payroll in the NBA. Are they the 8th best team? Not even close. Are they better than the Raptors, Mavs, Heat, Nuggets or Celtics, who all have lower payrolls? Obviously not. This is one of the first things owners have to examine when deciding whether management is doing a good job. What product have they delivered in exchange for $135 million of the owners' money. Even worse -- there is no flexibility next year, either. The Magic free up very little money after this season.
2) The future is not bright. There is no young superstar on the roster. (There is no all-star, period). There is no core of promising young talent. So you can't excuse the bloated team payroll by arguing that the return on investment will come 2 or 3 years from now.
3) The Draft. If Weltman and Hammond have made up their minds that they are not going to trade anyone, which apparently is their plan, then they sure as hell better draft well. And yet their 4-year draft grade has to be an F-minus. At the end of this season, Jonathan "Mr. Glass" Isaac will have played a grand total of 136 out of 309 possible games. 136 games in 4 seasons! Please don't tell me he has star potential or All-Defensive Team potential, which I see on this board all the time. He cannot block shots from the bench. The only elite skill he has is being injured. And if you've watched the NBA long enough you know it's not going to change. He is not going to miraculously become healthy and durable next season. It just doesn't work that way. It's not one injury or one season -- it's his first 4 years in the league. He is what he is. So Welt & Hamm got a do-over in the next draft with another #6 pick, and who did they take? Mo Bamba. Bamba looks like he will be out of the league in a few years. If by Year 3 a player still looks lost when/if he gets on the court while racking up DNP/CD's without explanation, then he sucks. Period. And in their third draft they really learned their lesson by taking a player who just had ACL surgery and couldn't play at all his rookie year, Chuma Okeke. Now he's finally playing in Year 2 except oops, no he's not, out several weeks with a knee injury. Shocker, who saw that coming? It might not matter so much if they were making trades and signing free agents to improve the team, but they're not. They literally re-signed and kept every Hennigan player and made garbage first-round draft picks for 4 years.