Magic draft FSU’s Isaac
Big man already face of another rebuilding
Florida State’s Jonathan Isaac, a 6-foot-10 forward, is congratulated by commissioner Adam Silver after Orlando took Isaac 6th overall in Thursday’s NBA Draft. At No. 33, the Magic grabbed Kansas State’s Wesley Iwundu.
And with the sixth pick in the 2017 NBA Draft, the Orlando Magic select … a guy who must become a superstar and the face of the franchise and lead a terrible team into the playoffs sooner rather than later.
Except there’s one problem: 19-year-old Florida State freshman Jonathan Isaac will tell you himself that he’s not that guy. He revealed to Magic fans a harsh truth on Thursday night — that yet another long rebuild could be beginning.
“I might say something that’s not what they [fans] want to hear,” Isaac said. “I understand that it’s a process and I’m not where I want to be. I don’t think momentum just shifts in a split second. It takes time to turn things around. … I’m not saying it’s going to take five years and I have no intention of it taking five years, but I know it’s going to be a process.”
Translation: Isaac is still just a skinny teenager; a 6-foot-10, 210-pound project who scored 8 points and fouled out the last time he was in the Amway Center — when the heavily favored Seminoles were buried 91-66 by Xavier in the NCAA Tournament. The fact is it’s going to be three or four years, a few million bench presses and 20 or 25 pounds before Isaac is ready to go toe-to-toe with the NBA’s best players
Even so, Isaac wasn’t just a
dribbling, dunking power forward with a big upside on Thursday night, he was a symbol of hope and change for a frustrated fan base and a new management team. For the thousands of approving Magic fans at the team’s draft party at the Amway Center, he at least gave them something to cheer about for one night.
After five miserable years of losing, it’s amazing how many fans the Magic are able to put into their arena for any game or event. If only the Magic team-builders and front office staff were as good at their jobs as the team’s ticket-sellers and marketing staff..
The good news, of course, is that the man in charge of building the team over the last five years — Rob Hennigan — is gone and has been replaced by two guys who actually seem to know what they’re doing. In Jeff Weltman, the new president of basketball operations, and his handpicked general manager — former Milwaukee Bucks architect John Hammond — the Magic have hired two men with a combined 63 years of front-office experience. Both Weltman (age 52) and Hammond (63) have been in the NBA for nearly as long as Hennigan has been alive.
The bad news: The addition of Weltman and Hammond won’t win the Magic a single additional game next year. If team executives won games, then the Knicks (Phil Jackson) would have played the Clippers (Doc Rivers) in the NBA Finals this year.
Instead, it was LeBron’s super team in Cleveland against Durant’s super team in Golden State. And, let’s be honest, that’s not going to change for several years. Quite frankly, the Magic’s goal shouldn’t be to win a championship in the next few years; it should be to simply become a lowlevel playoff team. With apologies to Al Davis, the Magic’s mantra should be: “Just finish .500, baby!”
As uninspiring as that sounds, this is where the Magic are right now. The last five years of Hennigan’s post-Dwight rebuild were essentially a half-decade of wasted time. The Magic’s roster now is worse than the one Hennigan inherited. He didn’t draft a single building block in five years and instead left the new management team a bunch of ill-fitting spare parts.
And even before Hennigan, the Magic’s drafts were suspect at best. Since taking Dwight Howard No. 1 overall in 2004, the Magic have had 10 first-round draft picks and the results go something like this: traded, bust, traded, just a guy, traded, traded, bust, traded, traded, never showed up.
This is why Weltman isn’t selling false hope. Even though he doesn’t say it, he knows the Magic are facing yet another long rebuild. Why else would he have traded the Magic’s other first-round pick (No. 25) for a future first- and secondround pick from Philly?
He knows if the Magic are going to clean up the mess, it’s going to be through the draft — this year’s, next year’s and the years to come. It’s not going to be by adding a superstar through free agency. When it comes to all of this talk about big-name players who may be on the move — Paul George, LeBron James, Chris Paul, etc. — the Magic aren’t even in the conversation.
“It’s a lot more fun when you’re in those talks,” Weltman says, “but you have to earn your way into those conversations.”
Hopefully, it started on Thursday night with FSU’s Isaac — the first draft pick of the second rebuild and the new young face of an otherwise faceless franchise.