If you're thinking the Eastern Conference is a two-team race between Boston and Miami, I strongly suggest you reconsider.
For starters, there's the history. Only one superstar has been in the past two Eastern Conference finals, and it isn't anyone on the Heat or the Celtics.
But more importantly, there's the present. Take a look at the past few weeks and it's the
Orlando Magic, not Miami or Boston, who are playing better than any team in basketball and have taken over the top spot in the
Power Rankings.
That may not be immediately apparent by looking at the standings, where Orlando's relatively benign 29-15 mark ranks fourth in the conference and sixth in the NBA; in fact the Magic are one bad night from being 10th.
Look at the past 16 games, however, and a very different story emerges. The Magic are 13-3 in that stretch, with nine of the wins by double figures. The three losses were all on the road, all against playoff teams, and came by a combined total of six points. They're a couple of shots away from riding a 16-game winning streak, in other words.
What makes this stretch particularly notable, however, is that it isn't some random hot streak plucked from the noise of the 82-game season, but rather is tied to a very specific event that has made the Magic a much more formidable team since Christmas.
That event, obviously, was the duo of blockbuster trades that brought in
Hedo Turkoglu,
Gilbert Arenas and
Jason Richardson. But the "why" continues to escape people. The trade-driven improvement has been a hard thing for folks to digest because the new players haven't exactly gone bonkers.
Turkoglu has played the best of the three, but even his output -- 11.8 points and 5.8 assists -- has been somewhere south of earth-shattering. Arenas is shooting just 36.1 percent in his new uniform, and Richardson (14.5 points per game) has scored dramatically less than he did in Phoenix.
The story, instead, has been all about what the Magic replaced. We gravitate toward tales of the hero riding in to the rescue, but Orlando's story is a much more mundane one of replacing bad players with average ones, thereby allowing already-present hero
Dwight Howard to win the Magic games they were heretofore losing. (Howard, incidentally, is also a very strong MVP candidate whom everyone seems hell-bent on ignoring while they fixate on shiny new objects like
Amare Stoudemire and
Derrick Rose).
This was how Orlando went just 16-10 before the trades -- the Magic, for all we thought of their supposed depth, basically had four productive players in their top eight (Howard,
Vince Carter,
J.J. Redick and
Jameer Nelson), and four others who were killing them.
What the trade allowed them to do was replace all four players who were killing them, and fill three of the spots with solid to excellent productivity. Turkoglu is playing better than he did in Toronto or Phoenix, but nobody is clearing space on the All-Star roster for him; his impact comes because
Mickael Pietrus and
Quentin Richardson played poorly (PERs of 8.64 and 9.76, respectively), so replacing them with a halfway decent player vastly improved the team.
Arenas hasn't played well, and yet his example illustrates the change, too. His PER as a Magician is still nearly double that of the man he replaced,
Chris Duhon, providing a much more competent 15 minutes of backup point guard play when Nelson rests. Orlando didn't need Agent Zero; it just needed to eliminate the zero it was taking at the position pre-trade. Should Arenas find his shooting stroke, the change will be even more dramatic.
And then there's the frontcourt. I'm going to keep saying this until somebody listens -- the greatest impact from these trades came because it forced Orlando to use two players who were already on the roster but hardly playing.
Prior to the trade,
Rashard Lewis and
Marcin Gortat were the other two-thirds of the Magic frontcourt rotation along with Howard; those two averaged 15.0 and 10.1 points per 40 minutes, respectively; each sported a PER around 12 in Orlando.
Since the deals, Orlando has given those minutes to
Brandon Bass and
Ryan Anderson, and the difference has been spectacular. These are arguably the two best players on the team after Howard; Anderson is second on the team in PER and points per minute, while Bass is third. Each has a true shooting percentage in the high 50s and both have a dramatically higher rebound rate than Lewis.
Add all those changes up and it's fomented an offensive explosion. Orlando ranked 14th in offensive efficiency on Dec. 22, at 104.2 points per 100 possessions. Since then, the Magic have owned the league's No. 1 offense, pumping in a league-leading 111.3 points per 100 trips.
Play offense that well and you barely need to consider defense, as the
Phoenix Suns showed us a year ago; the Magic, however, have lost surprisingly little at that end since the trade thanks to Howard's dominant presence. Orlando's 99.94 defensive efficiency mark over the 16-game stretch is the league's fifth best, and virtually identical to its pre-trade performance.
Obviously, it's possible we're witnessing a statistical outlier and that the Magic may regress to the mean. Defensively, in particular, the Magic appeared to make a downgrade at every position and may have trouble replicating this excellence over the final 38 games.
Here's the big takeaway, however: They don't need to. The midseason deals essentially converted Orlando from a defensive team to an offensive one, and a mighty fearsome offensive team at that. Between the ridiculous 3-point shooting (41.4 percent in the past 16 games, on nearly 28 hoists a game), Howard's increasingly refined post game on the inside and a nine-man rotation in which every player can score 20, guarding Orlando is officially a quandary. The scary part is that Arenas and Richardson haven't played well, yet the Magic are still lighting up scoreboards.
As I wrote at the time of the trades, it may not ultimately matter much in this conference. The Heat are going through a blistering stretch of their own (22-5 since the 9-8 start), and Boston seems likely to own both the top seed and the two big men (
Kendrick Perkins and
Shaquille O'Neal) whom historically have done the best job of containing Howard.
Regardless, Orlando's play post-trade can no longer be ignored. The Magic are a small-market team and the narrative behind the improvement hasn't been sound-bite friendly, plus 13-3 doesn't sound quite as impressive as ripping off a double-digit winning streak. But they're playing better than any team in the Association, and it's not clear to me why one would expect them to stop any time soon. At the very least, that should be enough to get the presumed duopoly atop the East reclassified as a triumvirate.
