Orlando Leaned Harder on Banchero When It Could Least Afford To
The final 10 games of Orlando's season told a story the win-loss record refused to tell cleanly. The Magic went 7-3 in that stretch, which reads like momentum. What it actually was: a star being fed the ball at an unsustainable rate because there was nowhere else to turn. Paolo Banchero's shot attempts climbed from 15.5 per game during the regular season to 20.4 in that closing run. His field-goal percentage fell from 47.2% to 40.7%. The team leaned hardest on its best player at precisely the moment his efficiency was cratering, and they paid for it when the playoffs arrived.
That volume-efficiency divergence is the number I keep returning to, because it doesn't describe a player who ran out of gas. It describes a roster that ran out of options. When a team has genuine secondary creation, it doesn't need its star to attempt five more shots a game down the stretch. Those extra attempts are a confession. They say: we looked elsewhere and came up empty.
The offseason answer has been Nikola Vucevic — which I covered in September, arguing it was half a solution at best. The center rotation needed addressing, and the gap between Wendell Carter Jr. at 11.6 points per game and Goga Bitadze at 5.6 was real and damaging. Vucevic helps that. What he doesn't fix is the forward depth behind Banchero, which remains thin, or the wing situation, which got thinner when Jett Howard departed for Dallas. Tristan da Silva averaged 9.2 points per game across the season but saw his minutes contract sharply in the final stretch — a rotation signal that suggests his role was already being questioned when it mattered most.
The backcourt is genuinely better. Desmond Bane at 19.4 points per game gives Orlando a second reliable scoring option who can create off the bounce, and the Suggs-Black pairing adds defensive versatility and secondary playmaking. If that trio can collectively absorb some of what Banchero was being asked to carry alone, the isolation dependency eases. That's the optimistic read, and it's not an unreasonable one.
My concern is that the forward position remains structurally exposed. Franz Wagner at 19.8 points per game is a legitimate co-star when healthy, but he played only 42 games last season, and the depth behind him — Penda, da Silva, the younger developmental pieces — doesn't project as reliable playoff scoring. If Wagner misses time again, or if Banchero hits another rough stretch, the Magic have no one at that position to absorb the load. The backcourt additions don't solve a forward problem. And the forward problem is exactly what those final 10 games exposed. Orlando's offseason was real work. It just wasn't work on the right wall.