The Uniquely Shitty Orlando Magic

The Orlando Magic are beyond interpretation. They're bad—bad like burnt coffee, bad like getting a rock thrown at your head—but anything beyond that would qualify as speculation. Watching their mish-mash of strangely talented young guys and veterans of varying quality coagulate for a single night, then dissolve over the next five, one gets the sense there is a lively and capable basketball team in there somewhere, but that it will never fully emerge. Promise technically abounds, given their youth and cap flexibility, but the squad is starless and loses frequently and unprettily. Where is this project headed?

Lousiness is excusable in the NBA as long as it's purposeful, and mediocrity is tolerated if a team is perceived to be gaining momentum in the direction of some grander endpoint. What inspires puzzlement in outside observers and anxiety in fans are teams that appear not to understand what they're trying to accomplish in a given season. The Bucks, for instance, are targeting a playoff run, and the Sixers are embracing putridity for at least another year. The Magic are somewhere between the come-up and the tank. They traded Dwight Howard in August of 2012, which officially kicked off a rebuild. Two-and-a-half years later, they're not just far from complete; they're incoherent. Ponderousness shouldn't define the team at this point in the process. Ponderousness breeds unrest.

A month before the 2014-15 season started, GM Rob Hennigan did a Q&A with the Orlando Sentinel in which the executive threw out wads of boardroom-speak—"values-based culture," "work capacity," "establish[ing] an identity on the floor"—that articulated his vision for the franchise about as well as an interpretive dance routine would have. Hennigan and his staff are looking for "growth," but they define the term so broadly that it's meaningless. "Growth" could mean more wins, but it might not. "Growth" is something that will be assessed "on a global scale," using "a blend of subjective and objective metrics." "Growth" is a dog from hell; "growth" is a townhouse made of dung.

Hennigan is probably being meaningfully obfuscatory. Most folks in his position make it a point to be that way, at least when talking to the press. They don't want to set targets they can't hit, nor do they want to tip their hand. The NBA's management class is increasingly made up of secretive hemmers and hawers, uncharismatic suits who speak frankly only about how much of a crapshoot team-building is. The best ones come off as withholding and smug, the worst as equivocating dweebs.

If this constant sentiment-hedging and goalpost-hiding is a way of making sure no one ever knows what you're plotting, then it is also a way of allowing the team you've constructed to speak for itself. The 2015 Magic are on a hilltop, sermonizing in what sounds a lot like car alarms and wet farts, but maybe we're not listening for the right things? At any rate, no one from within the front office is offering to translate. Other teams articulate themselves clearly—the Warriors are stupefyingly great; the Grizz are like weather-beaten leather—but when all you communicate in is ugly Elfrid Payton jumpers and mealy-mouthed half-endorsements of your possibly overmatched head coach, the townsfolk begin to feel unnerved. Maybe this isn't going to plan, they think. Then again, they wouldn't know.

Rebuilds are exercises in despair management. Most GMs might be cold rationalists, but most fans aren't. An executive's refusal to set developmental benchmarks doesn't mean those benchmarks don't exist in the minds of anyone who follows the team. At some point, vague assurances of growth and an understanding of probabilities are not enough to keep you from pessimism and bitterness. You want your team to win some damn games already, or to at least indicate that they're on a path toward achieving as much.

The Magic have the fifth-worst record in the NBA. On the court, nothing quite fits. Head coach Jacque Vaughn seems not to know what he's doing. None of this means Rob Hennigan's venture is doomed, but without any explanation as to what we're looking at when we watch the team play, or what Hennigan hopes to achieve this season, we're left to our own powers of observation, which indicate that the Magic are just plain bad. To see anything else requires a powerful imagination.