JJZFL

Thank you for that helpful characterization. If you’ve watched the Magic these past few years, you’ve seen pretty bad offense. You’ve seen guys with better numbers elsewhere get plugged in and become worse. The question is if Bane is the guy who can change that around, and if he’ll be given the opportunity to do so. Our offense is pretty set in its ways. I guess we’ll find out next season. Sorry you don’t like this discussion (what else are you supposed to do on a forum?). Should we just all cheer the move 100% even if some of us have doubts?

I think that's a very fair assessment. At this point it's not clear to me whether Bane or Suggs would have the primary role of bringing the ball up the floor and setting up the offense, but as you point out it won't really matter if the offense doesn't evolve along the lines you mention in your comment.

If he doesn’t get many touches it won’t matter. Who is going to distribute?

Not advocating for a different trade. I continue to be concerned that our offense will remain similar to last year with Bane at the 2 instead of KCP. I’d like to see us get a true PG and that would have been first on my list. Maybe we can still get one, but salary concerns and trading so many picks away already may make that impossible. I’m afraid that Suggs becomes PG again.

You said the same thing last summer. Didn’t work for last season and won’t work now either.

There are approximately 3,048 hours left until the start of the next NBA season. That is a lot of checking!!

The same vision of playing without a playmaker that didn’t worked for the past two years. I hope for a much different looking offense in the upcoming season. Whether Bane will be the one to catalyze that remains to be seen. I have my doubts. I also am not at all certain that the Magic will try to (or even be able to) add a strong PG at this point, but I’d love to be wrong about that.

We can also rerun Corey Joseph.

Amen. Basically upgrading KCP for Bane at a cost which may make any significant additional deals impossible because our best trade assets are gone. Bane is a fine three point shooter but had a world class facilitator in Morant. KCP also looked a lot better when he was facilitated by Jokic. I still worry about not having a first rate PG and I don’t think we have enough left to trade for one. This really reminds me of the KCP deal last year, except in this case we have to give up a bunch of assets.

Not sure what we’ve got left to make a move with

I don’t think it should be a dominant factor, but in my opinion it can and should be taken into consideration if you have a bunch of candidates who are close. I disagree that there’s something intrinsically wrong with getting the fan base excited. Again, not like we’ve been hitting home runs with picks in the 16-25 range. Might as well pick someone who engages fan interest if we think they’re a viable candidate.

There’s also the UF angle. I think drafting Clayton would excite Magic Fans a great deal, many of whom also root for UF. It’s an intangible, but should not be ignored. What’s wrong with adding a little excitement once in awhile? Especially in a case like this where it costs very little. Can anyone name for me any recent Magic draft picks who were drafted higher than 8 who made a significant impact on the team? What do we have to lose?

Yes. Our main problem is that we just didn't lose enough games. If we'd only lost more games the past 12 years or so, we'd be phenomenal today. If we really tried hard, maybe we could have gone 3-4 years without winning a single game! Perhaps that's something we can still aspire to in the future.

What is soccer?

It would certainly get a large number of Magic fans pretty excited. Probably the reason they won’t do it ☹️

Looks like the forum has been upgraded, by the way. Appreciate it!

I would also. I think Knecht in particular as a rookie has shown a ton of promise.

He didn’t actually literally run them into the ground. As far as I know, all of them are still above ground. But I understand and agree with your larger point.

I just try to call it like I see it. I was probably impacted by the rose colored glasses everyone seemed to be wearing when we first decided that tanking was a brilliant strategy. We were going to be great within a few years with our “young guns”. I do think people (sorry Jay) are mostly a lot more realistic now having learned from our experience.

I dunno. I think it’s not either/or, it’s both. I’ve been a primary critic of our lack of ball movement and a generally stale offense. But I’ve also seen enough missed open threes (sometimes airballs) to recognize that we need some personnel improvements too.

As expected, OKC prohibitive favorites for upcoming finals at -700. I think I read somewhere that may be the most any team has ever been favored in finals history. To illustrate what that means in real numbers, someone betting $10 on the Thunder would only win $1.60 (in addition to getting the $10 they bet back).

LOL

So am I. But we’ve heard rumors like this about interesting players so many times that it’s hard to get too excited about it yet.

I agree also, and as you know I’ve been saying this for years.

Well put. Actually I was thinking about this even before your post, and can’t think of any pick we’ve made outside a top 10 pick which has really helped us. Okeke, Anthony, Howard, and so on. None have moved the needle.