The Orlando Magic dominated the Los Angeles Lakers Wednesday night 127-105 and it was a terrible win.
Welcome to the Orlando Sports Weekly Rundown, I'm David Baumann.
What made it a bad victory?
Simply put, it allowed the Atlanta Hawks to leapfrog the Magic for the worst record in the league.
And if the season were to have ended that night, the Hawks -- not the Magic -- would have had best odds for the #1 pick in the 2018 NBA Draft.
Thankfully for the Magic's sake, there are 30 games left to play in the regular season.
Check that...
30 games left to LOSE in the regular season.
I believe the Magic need to "tank" from here on out.
In other words, THEY NEED TO LOSE EVERY SINGLE GAME remaining in the regular season in order to secure the best odds for the top spot in the coming draft.
And most Magic fans would agree with me!
In fact, I posed the question on Twitter recently...
Asking, essentially, what the Magic's strategy should be for the remainder of the regular season.
65% said the Magic should tank.
Not "keep playing to win"...
Not "trade everybody except Aaron Gordon"...
Not "fire Frank Vogel"...
Tank!
Sure, losing sucks, I get it.
But should anyone be subjected to another night of this garbage they trot out onto the Amway Center floor every night?
Many Magic fans will embrace tanking for the chance to get the best odds at adding either Oklahoma's Trae Young, Arizona's DeAndre Ayton, Europe's Luca Doncic, Duke's Marvin Bagley III (or name your favorite) at #1 in the 2018 NBA Draft.
Scoring the top odds at the #1 pick should be the Magic's top priority.
If you win that #1 position - you also get the bonus of receiving trade offers from teams who want that top draft pick.
And this is the last year tanking truly pays dividends.
The team with the worst record gets a 25% chance of landing the top pick.
The team with the second-worst record gets a 19.9% chance... and so on.
Had the Magic lost to the Lakers instead of winning, they would have been atop the odds chart.
But in 2019, the NBA is making a rule change to curb tanking.
In short, they don't want teams purposely losing anymore.
In that coming rule change, the three worst teams will get the same odds at the top pick in the 2019 NBA Draft.
And each of those three teams will only get a 14% chance at #1!
So the Magic better make the most of their final opportunity to tank right now and lose every single game for the rest of this season!
Last year, the Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets publicly tanked by sitting some of their best players for the final few weeks of the season.
Yes, they just shut down some of their top guys.
So those teams didn't even HIDE their deliberate tanking strategies.
Yet the Magic, stupidly -- yes STUPIDLY -- chose to try and keep winning at the end of the 2016-17 season and that STUPID decision came back to bite them.
The Suns, Lakers and Nets all ended up with better positions in the draft.
The Magic, meanwhile, ended up with the fifth-best odds in the draft, and ended up picking SIXTH!
So the Magic never even got a chance to choose Markelle Fultz, Lonzo Ball, Jayson Tatum, Josh Jackson or De'Aaron Fox...
Those guys were already off the board before the Magic got to pick at #6.
Orlando ended up with Jonathan Isaac, who's very raw... and has unfortunately been injured most of this year.
If the Magic do the same thing they did last season and keep trying to win games... therefore losing out on the chance to pick Young, Ayton or Doncic, I'm going to lose my mind.
Magic head coach Frank Vogel has spoken publicly against the very idea of tanking.
So President of Basketball Ops Jeff Weltman and GM John Hammond need to simply not give Vogel a say in the matter.
Weltman and Hammon should be shutting down Aaron Gordon and Evan Fournier sooner rather than later, giving Vogel less ammunition on the court.
Both Gordon and Fournier have been injured on-and-off throughout the year, so it would be easy to shut them down and claim "they need to get healthy."
Then coach Frank Vogel can trot out more G-League guys from Lakeland... and tanking can mercifully ensue.
So to sum up...
The Magic better tank and get the best odds at the #1 pick or I'll lead a protest outside Amway.
From atop a tank.
David Baumann is a Sports Columnist for 407area.com and can be heard Tuesdays 7-9pm on EK Sports, 96.9 The Game. He can be seen Thursdays, Saturdays and Sunday on Spectrum Sports 360's Face Off Segment at 10:30 on Spectrum News 13, HD channel 1013.
