In case anyone had any doubts, the Orlando Magic will be playing some form of basketball beyond April 12, the final day of the regular season.<\/p>\n
With the San Antonio Spurs’ 127-95 blowout win over Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks, the Orlando Magic have clinched a spot in the play-in, at the very least.<\/p>\n
This is the direction it’s been trending for a while. The Bucks are losers of nine of their last 11 games and have dealt with myriad injuries, most notably to Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Porter Jr.<\/p>\n
Time is running out for Magic to escape play-in:<\/p>\n
At 39-34, there is a 10-game difference between Orlando and Milwaukee. The Magic are currently tied with the Charlotte Hornets for the No. 9 seed in the East, one game back of the Philadelphia 76ers for No. 7 and 1.5 games back of the Atlanta Hawks for No. 6<\/p>\n
The biggest issue is that there’s just nine games left in the season. And Orlando, who snapped its six-game losing streak over the tanking Sacramento Kings earlier this week, still has games left against Toronto, Phoenix, Atlanta, Detroit, Minnesota and Boston.<\/p>\n
As a result, the Magic have the ninth-hardest schedule. They are just 8-19 against teams top-10 in point differential, the 12th-worst mark in the NBA, according to Cleaning The Glass. Their struggles have come on the defensive end in those games, surrendering 120.3 points per 100 possessions. Over a full season, that number would rank No. 27.<\/p>\n
Their upcoming game against the Hawks offers a prime opportunity to potentially cut into the gap between the two teams in the standings. A lot can change fairly quickly, even though time is quickly running out.<\/p>\n
The Hawks were the team to snap the Magic’s seven-game winning streak, which subsequently sent them spiriling into a six-game losing streak. Perhaps Orlando can return the favor; Atlanta is 15-3 since the All-Star break, which included an 11-game win streak, tied for the fourth-longest of any team this season.<\/p>\n
Should the Magic make their second-straight play-in, they will likely face a combination of Philadelphia, Charlotte or Miami in their first game. Where? And for what? Well, there’s still plenty of shuffling that can still take place.<\/p>\n
All that we know right now is that the Magic will be play-in bound — at the very least — once their frustrating, inconsistent regular season concludes.<\/p>\n
For better or worse.<\/p>\n
More Orlando Magic OnSi Stories:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In case anyone had any doubts, the Orlando Magic will be playing some form of basketball beyond April…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140],"class_list":["post-210041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}