{"id":398955,"date":"2026-09-13T22:26:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T22:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/398955\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T22:26:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T22:26:07","slug":"orlando-magics-eastern-conference-journey-is-potentially-getting-way-harder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/398955\/","title":{"rendered":"Orlando Magic&#8217;s Eastern Conference Journey is Potentially Getting Way Harder"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And this is interesting for the Magic because they have consecutive games right in the beginning of the season, before the end of October, in which they will play at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto against the Raptors. One is just a normal regular-season game, but then the other one kicks off NBA Cup play. And I&#8217;ve talked about this, I&#8217;ve written about it, that so much of that cup game is going to be dependent on whether Leonard is playing. And if Leonard&#8217;s playing, that&#8217;s going to make things a lot more difficult for the Magic, right? Like, this is a very talented Raptors team, a young Raptors team that, like Orlando, is trying to take the next step. And now, given all his flaws objectively on the floor, they are adding\u2014when healthy\u2014one of the best basketball players of this generation and one of the ultimate two-way threats. I mean, the Toronto Raptors do not win a championship in 2019 without Kawhi Leonard on the team. And that is why they took a bet on him. And now he is older and, you know, incredibly injury-prone. But the reason that I believe he&#8217;s going to step on the floor (now that obviously there&#8217;s not going to be a suspension) is that it&#8217;s so early in the season that, for all intents and purposes, he should be healthy.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And this is interesting for the Magic because they have consecutive games right in the beginning of the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,1239,140],"class_list":["post-398955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-magic","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398955","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=398955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}