There would have been little expectation for Evan Fournier to break out the way he did at the beginning of the season.
Fournier was tearing up the league as the Orlando Magic’s leading scorer and was making a lot of players the Magic might have thought were long-term pieces look expendable. Fournier pushed his way into the starting lineup and pushed Victor Oladipo to the bench.
Fournier gave the Magic something they had not had on the roster. He was a great shooter, adept at pick and rolls working off the dribble while looking to score and was a passable defender. He showed a lot of versatility and he did not need the ball to score and succeed. That is important on a team with a lot of high-usage players.
So long as the Magic got strong play from Fournier among their other big players, the Magic were successful.
Then January . . . oh, January.
Orlando has lost 11 of the past 12 games and has fallen completely off the Playoff pace in the Eastern Conference, falling 2.5 games behind. And the schedule in February and March will do the team no favors. There is not panic, but definitely some urgency to right the ship.
Evan Fournier has had a precipitous decline too leaving the Magic with a more intriguing and interesting question for the offseason and trade deadline with Fournier’s impending restricted free agency.
Joe Buckley at Orlando Magic Daily looked at this decline earlier this month, writing:
After his earlier streak of scoring in double figures finished, Fournier found it hard to repeat the feat in even a small way for much of December, even suffering through a few weeks where he scored double figures just twice in seven games. Fournier had a brief resurgence, following this up with an eight-game streak of double figures, though not with the same highs as before.
Indeed, this later streak included a solitary 20-point outing against the Pelicans. In fact, since Nov. 18, this is Fournier’s only 20-point game. Quite hard to believe after his start.
If these struggles were accompanied by a change in role such as Victor Oladipo’s or nagging injuries such as the one Elfrid Payton is carrying, it would be understandable to a point. Even if the team continued to do well, fans would happily overlook smaller stats in the way of a higher win total.
Fournier went from 17.8 points per game in November down to 11.6 points per game in December. After a slow start to the month, he is back up to 11.6 points per game. But it is clear Fournier is not getting back to that amount.
More troubling is how Fournier’s 3-point shooting has precipitously dropped — going from 41.6 percent to 39.4 percent to 36.1 percent. Fournier’s shooting is what makes him a key cog to the Magic. Now that Oladipo is shooting better than him and returning to his mean, Fournier has dropped off.
His shooting has fallen off significantly as Steven Covella of Orlando Pinstriped Post writes:
Two of the biggest takeaways: his shooting from the perimeter has been noticeably worse, and he’s taken significantly fewer shots at the rim. When Fournier was running on all cylinders earlier this season, he was capable of knocking down timely threes, and was great at attacking the basket. His recent dip in efficiency and scoring — 14.4 points per game before January 1, 10 per game since — can be attributed to his struggles in those areas of the floor where he was so effective earlier this season.
Coming off the bench, Fournier is scoring a bit more. That is a good sign for the Magic. But he is -12.4 points per game in his three games coming off the bench. Something is still not quite clicking for Fournier even though his numbers seem to have stabilized.
That is making things more difficult for the Magic as they move forward and try to dig out of this hole.
