It’s finally happening for the Magic: with a 40-40 record, they are almost a lock to make the playoffs. All these years of kinda rebuilding but not really, trying to stay competitive instead of tanking, pushing for the 8th seed but always ending up with the 10th (or worse, usually worse), all that has come to an end. I was fooled many times by Magic teams that looked good on paper, so many times that I believed that their “core” (whatever it consists of) would be stuck just out of the playoffs forever. 40-40 isn’t much to be proud of, but it’s way better than pretty much anything they’ve done since losing Dwight Howard.
Another accomplishment for the Magic: the managed to make some of their players so good that they were graduated from my channel. Congratulations to Nikola Vucevic, who is actually a legitimate beast this year, and Aaron Gordon, who isn’t really a beast but everyone knows full well who he is so he fell outside the scope of my channel. I don’t think I’ve ever, in all my years of making this videos, had to ignore Magic players. Perhaps it will be a Sixers-like situation: one year, they’re full of random scrubs/role-players who don’t really fit, and the next, they’re winning playoff series. One can hope.
Evan Fournier is still eligible for DTB highlightage, and he probably will be for the rest of time, because he’s one of those rare Euros that no one cares about (not even French people, come on). His scoring is down this year, and I don’t really know why, but even if it was up, there just isn’t any hype around him. Is it because of his messed up hair? I don’t know what he’s doing to it, but it doesn’t look SO bad now.