The Orlando Magic had a promising debut despite a loss to the Washington Wizards. The team has big expectations they want to meet this year.
The Orlando Magic opened their season Wednesday with a 88-87 loss to the Washington Wizards. It was a game wrapped up in everything that has driven fans crazy about the Magic for so long.
There were the glimpses of defense flying around and slowing down Washington’s high-powered (by preseason standards) offense. There was the team playing with incredible pace and pushing the ball down the floor quickly to attack.
Yes, there were moments of lulls where the team lost its identity a bit or fell into bad habits. Despite the loss, though, things were generally positive for the Magic. They showed plenty of signs this year will be very different for them.
Scott Skiles’ impact was pretty immediate with the way the team swarmed on defense and the way the team played in general. It was far from perfect. Bad habits crept in as the team fumbled away another late-game lead.
Fans though hopefully saw something positive to build off.
This is a big year for the Magic in many, many ways though. Orlando is looking to establish its identity all over again in Skiles’ image and the expectation is for this team to take a step forward and a step up into competitiveness.
It leaves a lot of questions that need some answering.
The biggest one is how the Magic will fare with Scott Skiles in the lead chair.
Carson Ingle, who writes both for this site as well as our sister site Orlando Magic Daily, went on the The Crash Show on 95.7 The Hog in Daytona to preview the team and highlights the coaching change as a major storyline for the season.
That was something that was apparent too when I went on with the Football Insiders show on Sports Talk Florida 1080 AM in Orlando.
The big question in addition to the coaching is how the young players develop and which players step up. That would include Tobias Harris, Victor Oladipo and Nikola Vucevic. But it goes to young players like Aaron Gordon and Elfrid Payton continuing their ascendancy.
There were plenty of lineup questions too — and they were not completely solved when the Magic elected to start Evan Fournier last night at small forward.
Orlando provides plenty of intrigue as I noted when I joined the show.
Whether or not the Magic make the Playoffs is still a question that is seemingly up in the air. They could certainly compete and play for a spot, but the competition is stiff, as I noted at the end of the above clip.
There are still 81 games to figure this out. At least through one game, it seems the Magic are a much better team and a team ready to take a step up in their play.
We will see if they can deliver on that promise.
