Jeff Weltman, president of basketball operations for the Magic, plans to evaluate the team's performance and medical issues this summer after their first-round playoff exit. He believes the team showed potential by leading 3-1 against the top team in the East before injuries impacted their performance.
Key points
Jeff Weltman plans to evaluate the Magic this summer
The team was eliminated from the playoffs for the third consecutive season
Weltman believes injuries impacted their playoff performance
The Magic led 3-1 against the top team in the East
Mentioned in this story
Jeff Weltman
Orlando MagicNBA playoffs
(Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)
Are the Magic, as currently constructed, good enough to make a deep playoff run?
That was the question posed to Magic president of basketball operations Jeff Weltman less than 24 hours after Orlando was eliminated from the first round of the NBA playoffs for a third consecutive season.
“Here’s what I’ll say to that,” Weltman said last Monday, “We went up 3-1 against the No. 1 team in the East and had we stayed healthy, I’d like to imagine where we would’ve gone in this series and beyond.
“When you build a team for the playoffs, you try to construct a roster that has the attributes that we have,” he added. “And it’s not easy to get the positional versatility, the guys that can elevate their games when they matter the most, the physicality … A lot of the way that we’re built is designed to be successful in the playoffs and I think we unfortunately didn’t see enough of that. But when healthy, we got a pretty good look at that. I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t have competed with anybody else in the East if we could compete with the No. 1 team like that.”
So, is health the only reason Orlando was unable to close out its playoff series against Detroit?
Of course not. And that’s partly why Weltman dismissed coach Jamahl Mosley the day after the Magic were eliminated and also discussed Orlando’s roster needs —
Q&A
What did Jeff Weltman say about the Magic's playoff performance?
Jeff Weltman expressed that the team had potential, having led 3-1 against the top team in the East, and believes injuries affected their playoff run.
What will the Magic evaluate this summer?
The Magic will evaluate everything, including the team's performance and medical issues, as part of their offseason strategy.
How many consecutive seasons have the Magic been eliminated in the first round?
The Magic have been eliminated from the first round of the NBA playoffs for three consecutive seasons.
What is the significance of the Magic's 3-1 lead in the playoffs?
The 3-1 lead against the No. 1 team in the East highlights the team's potential and raises questions about how far they could have gone if they had remained healthy.
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But if health played such a key role in the downfall of Orlando’s season — both in the regular season and playoffs — who’s to blame?
“There are a lot of different ways to look at that,” Weltman said when asked if he needs re-evaluate the Magic’s medical staff. “This isn’t some venture where you’re dealing with a thousand episodes and you can kind of discern all these patterns. You’re dealing with a few things every year. You have to like strain out the players and the injuries and stuff like that. I think when we look at this season, Franz’s injury was (that) a defensive player jumped up … and he landed on his back.
“I don’t know what’s to be done about that,” Weltman added. “I don’t think beyond that we had injuries that were beyond the pale compared to others. That was the one.”
Weltman was referring to the Dec. 7 incident in New York when Knicks center Ariel Hukporti fell on Franz Wagner, which resulted in a left high ankle sprain.
Except Wagner’s injury and the rehabilitation that followed ended up as far more complicated than Weltman described.
In total, Wagner missed 48 regular season games. He initially sat 16 games before returning for two against the Grizzlies that took place in Europe. Upon return, Wagner dealt with lingering soreness and missed nine more games. He then played twice on limited minutes against the Bucks at home ahead of the All-Star break.
After the league break, however, Wagner’s season was put on hold again for six more weeks. He’d miss 22 more games before playing five of the final six games of the regular season, both of Orlando’s two play-in games and the first four playoff games against Detroit.
“I think Franz is intensely competitive and … towards the very back end of rehabilitations and return-to-play, there’s a lot of gray area,” Weltman said of Wagner’s extended rehab. “… Frankly, these things aren’t black and white. There’s a lot of gray matter that you deal with with these things. … It’s tricky.
“We’re never going to put him in a position to ever sustain a serious injury, but if some of this comes down to like the metrics are good, the numbers look good, the patterns look good, the imaging looks good… Are we ready? Has the reconditioning run its course? OK,” he added. “It’s intensely competitive athletes giving everything that they’ve got and some of that is just going to have to be learned on the court. So, I don’t know how else to assess it than that.”
To be sure, Wagner wasn’t the only Magic player to miss time due to injury this season.
Paolo Banchero missed 10 games with a left groin strain. Anthony Black missed 18 games, including 15 due to a left lateral abdominal strain. Jonathan Isaac missed 23 games, including 17 due to a left knee sprain. Jalen Suggs missed a total of 25 because of various injuries, including eight because of a grade 1 right knee MCL bruise. Even Jett Howard missed 10 games, including six because of a left ankle sprain.
The list goes on.
“We have to figure out some players, are they going to be injury prone? Are they beyond our help?” Weltman asked. “… We have to also look at the other side of it. We have to say hey, ‘Desmond Bane just played 82 games this year.’ The guy’s kind of been a 65-game player. Wendell (Carter Jr.) played 78 games.
“The first thing I do is credit the players themselves because this is so hard and those are major accomplishments,” Weltman added. “But I think we also need to say, maybe these guys are doing something right — our performance staff, our nutritionist and all that.”
Orlando’s first-round series with Detroit took a turn when Wagner suffered a right calf strain in Game 4, when the Magic took a 3-1 series lead. The German forward missed the final three games of the series that the Pistons won to advance for the first time since 2008.
After Thursday night, Detroit held a 2-0 series lead over the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Orlando could only watch from home and question how it all went wrong.
“We look at everything,” Weltman said. “There’s nothing from scouting to analytics to performance to medical that we don’t turn over every rock over the summer. We’ll have deep-dive evaluations on everything.”
