CTMagicUK

The long wait is over. The NBA season starts tonight. Let's go.

One thing's for sure is I can't imagine we have our unbeaten home streak after this run. If we do I'll officially start "this is a championship team when healthy" talk.

"GM I don't like makes good move = luck GM I don't like makes bad move = terrible GM and not at all related to luck."

Also I think this was a lot of the good and bad of Wendell. He played some terrific defense, battled on the glass, had 5 assists, but it feels like at some point when Paolo arrived he was like "alright I guess I don't need to score now" and he's just never been as aggressive on that end again. I actually thought he might have a big game the way he started but the 3 point jumper seems to have abandoned him now (possibly due to the bad hand injury last year) and it also feels like he's less explosive around the rim than he used to be. Feel like when he first got here he used to get those OREBs and explode back up to finish, now it's a lot of pump fakes and hoping his shot doesn't get blocked or he just throws the ball out to the wing.

Yea this team is past morale victories but hard to be too mad about that one. Down our two best players and our best guy to guard Giannis, on the road, against a team with that amount of talent. We played hard and fell just short, it happens.

A trade with Wendell is out of the cards though.

Jett Howard is a really interesting player. It's quite clear he has the passing, ball handling and jumper to be a real offensive piece, and he clearly is trying on defense but boy is he not good on that end either individually or as a team defender and that's a problem. He's the kind of guy who if he played in a big market and got minutes on a bad defensive team people would overrate the hell out of him because of the flashes.

This organisation selected and developed Franz Wagner. Scouts said he might be a 3/4 tweener and as a rookie we played him at PG and SG at times (partly due to injuries) to develop his ball handling. The idea that we lucked into him when literally nobody was saying he was this good is wild. We also brought in his brother for free off the scrap heap in a move that is one of the more underrated moves they've made because it likely helped Franz settle to have his brother around and Mo Wagner became one of our important bench pieces at the exact same time. I think Mo Wagner was actually a culture setting move too. A guy who was almost out of the league who scrapped and clawed his way into being a legitimate NBA player. Everyone crying we can't trade WCJ because we have Goga but they ignore that Indiana literally gave up on Goga and this organisation brought him in and developed him so much so that he literally said this summer he wanted to stay because this organisation saved his career. Nobody wants to give any credit to the decision makers for that? A few years ago Rob Hennigan traded Oladipo and Sabonis for the corpse of Serge Ibaka, now we've got an actually good front office (not perfect by any stretch, nobody is) and people still want to complain about it when they've built the best team we've had in a long time. The people who want to trade WCJ, Jett and Cole for some random scoring guard who plays no defense are the same people who'd have traded Vuc for a packet of chips before he had his all star years and became valuable enough to net us the pick that became Franz. Fans aren't patient. But this front office is and usually it's proven to be worthwhile for them to be patient. Tyus Jones being the big point of contention for people is absolutely mind blowing. He's the starting PG on a team with a worse record than us who we just beat without our two best players.

Also great Cole game. And Caleb Houstan had some big moments too amazingly.

Great win. The Phoenix suns big man rotation is so bad without Nurkic, they had no answer for Goga just being a big body around the rim. Jalen hit some big shots. Everyone played great defense. Still, somehow, unbeaten at home.

Is this a sick joke? The same exact *****ing injury. This blows. Carrying our offense must put a lot of strain on the oblique huh? I'd start AB. He's far from perfect, some nights he's far from even being good on offense, but he's the only guy on the team who can even consistently get into the lane off the dribble.

And, call me crazy, I like it when basketball players play basketball.

Lonzo Ball has played a grand total of 6 NBA games since January 2022.

Even if you think he's the worst NBA player of all time it's the easiest thing in the world to justify giving him an extension just based on the NBA landscape and our salary position moving forward. In the modern NBA players don't become free agents anywhere near as often because front offices have got a lot smarter and if a player has positive value (which Wendell likely does and will continue to have irrespective of your opinion of him) it makes a lot more sense to resign him and then trade him in the future if we want a change than let him expire. Not only that but the Magic will now be over the cap, and possibly over the tax, from now until such time as we're no longer paying the Paolo/Franz/Suggs core. So there is legitimately no benefit to letting Wendell be a free agent. We wouldn't gain any flexibility whatsoever. And, given that, even if Wendell literally forgets how to play basketball, it's better to have a 19m salary to match in a trade then it is to have nothing because the trade would help us improve but just not having him under contract wouldn't.

Super hyped for this game tonight. Biggest game of the season.

I didn't look hard. And to be clear I don't need numbers to tell me Tyus Jones is not a good defensive player.

I like to think that loss to us really set them into a slump, since that game they're 2-6.

Fun fact, last season Tyus Jones was statistically the worst defensive player on the 28th ranked defense in the NBA.

Also so glad we all got treated to ref ball. That's why we all watch right everyone? Fouls, FTs and challenges that have to be made because the refs continuously make the wrong calls.

What an ugly game. But we win ugly games more often than not.

This is the definition of a trap game. We literally just beat them and Schroder is back.

I guess I'm not in the half then because I certainly wouldn't have benched one of the best defensive players in the NBA for Tyus Jones.

11 out of 12 wins. Another one hopefully coming on Sunday then a big game on TNT in MSG on Tuesday night. This season has been so much fun so far.

Could we even afford to extend Cam Thomas and stay under the second apron? I don't think we can but haven't done the hard math.

This team is officially too good to get dragged into dog fights by scrappy teams that lack talent. Those teams win by playing harder than you. We used to be one of those teams. Except we outwork those teams even still and we have the better players. Keep this mentality and win again on Sunday.