{"id":65685,"date":"2025-11-30T20:22:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T20:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/65685\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T20:22:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T20:22:07","slug":"where-orlando-magic-stand-through-20-nba-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/65685\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Orlando Magic stand through 20 NBA games"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although the 2025-26 NBA<\/a> season is still young and the playoff race is far from heating up, the Magic<\/a> already have played 20 of their 82 regular-season game in the blink of an eye.<\/p>\n

Entering Sunday\u2019s slate, Orlando<\/a> (12-8) sat seventh in the Eastern Conference and just two games behind the second-place Raptors (14-6).<\/p>\n

Nearly a quarter of the way through the season, Jamahl Mosley<\/a>\u2018s squad already has faced plenty of adversity following a 1-4 start and an injury to star forward Paolo Banchero<\/a>, who\u2019s missed the last eight contests.<\/p>\n

But to Orlando\u2019s credit, the group didn\u2019t quit despite the slow start and went 10-4 in November to get on track toward its goal of reaching the postseason for a third year in a row.<\/p>\n

Before turning the page on the first 20 games of the season, here\u2019s a look at where the Magic stand heading into December:<\/p>\n

Offensive gains<\/p>\n

Both Mosley and president of basketball operations Jeff Weltman sought to improve Orlando\u2019s offense this season by acquiring Desmond Bane<\/a> and adding assistant coaches God Shammgod and Joe Prunty to the staff over the summer.<\/p>\n

Early returns have indicated the Magic are well on the their way to mitigating their offensive woes from the past. In 11 of their 20 first games, they\u2019ve scored 120-plus points \u2014 something they did just 10 times across 82 last year.<\/p>\n

Entering Sunday, Orlando\u2019s offensive rating (117.3) sat eighth league-wide, which is 19 spots higher from where last season\u2019s offensive rating (108.9) ended.<\/p>\n

For context, the Magic haven\u2019t ended a season outside the bottom 10 in offensive rating since Hall of Famer Dwight Howard\u2019s last season with the franchise in 2012.<\/p>\n

Defensive output<\/p>\n

A large reason for Orlando\u2019s offensive output has been the group\u2019s defense.<\/p>\n

The Magic are getting out in transition off their stops, which has led to easy buckets around the rim (54.2 points in the paint per night were fourth-most ahead of Sunday) or kick-outs to open shooters waiting on the perimeter (their 3-point percentage is up from league-low 31.8% last season to 34.7%, which ranked 22nd Sunday).<\/p>\n

Orlando grabs 70.7% of its defensive rebounds, which has helped the team allow the third-fewest second-chance points in the NBA (13.3) and the third-fewest offensive rebounds to opponents (10.6) per night.<\/p>\n

The Magic also do a solid job of running teams off the 3-point line as they allow the fewest 3-point attempts from opponents at 32 per contest.<\/p>\n

Orlando\u2019s defensive rating isn\u2019t where it ended last season (second-best behind only the Thunder at 109.1) but it\u2019s not far off,\u00a0 sitting ninth league-wide at 112.4 per NBA.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Better with Banchero<\/p>\n

Although the Magic have gone 6-2 without Banchero (left groin strain), they ultimately need their All-Star back to sustain success in the long term.<\/p>\n

Orlando already had turned the early portion of its season around with Banchero on the court before he got hurt. After a 1-4 start, the Magic went 5-2 in the seven games before his absence.<\/p>\n

In the first 12 games of the season, Banchero averaged 21.7 points, 8.7 rebounds and 4.1 assists during 32.8 minutes per game alongside a team-high five double-doubles.<\/p>\n

Among the 14 five-man lineups across the league who have played at least 100 minutes together this season, Orlando\u2019s opening night lineup of Banchero, Bane, Franz Wagner, Jalen Suggs and Wendell Carter Jr. still boasted the best net-rating (plus-19.3) entering Sunday, according to NBA.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we all agree the Magic\u2019s ceiling is much higher with Banchero,\u201d the Ringer\u2019s Zach Lowe said on Amazon\u2019s Prime Network<\/a> after Orlando defeated Detroit on Friday. \u201cThey need Banchero to hit that ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next<\/p>\n

The Magic open December with a three-game homestand commencing Monday against the Bulls.<\/p>\n

After Chicago (9-10), Orlando will play six of its eight games against teams with an-above .500 record, including San Antonio (13-5) on Wednesday, twice against the Heat (13-7) and next Sunday at New York (12-6).<\/p>\n

The Magic have shown they can handle their business against weaker competition, going 5-1 against teams below .500, but so far have only split their matchups against teams .500-or-better with a 7-7 record.<\/p>\n

Jason Beede can be reached at jbeede@orlandosentinel.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Up next \u2026<\/p>\n

Magic vs. Bulls<\/p>\n

When:\u00a07:30 p.m., Monday, Kia Center<\/p>\n

TV:\u00a0FanDuel Sports Network Florida\/Peacock<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Although the 2025-26 NBA season is still young and the playoff race is far from heating up, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65686,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,2295,139,141,1239,140,109,110],"class_list":{"0":"post-65685","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-orlando","8":"tag-latest-headlines","9":"tag-nba","10":"tag-orlando","11":"tag-orlando-headlines","12":"tag-orlando-magic","13":"tag-orlando-news","14":"tag-social","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65685","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=65685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}