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| | Monday, July 10 | |||||
Special to ESPN.com | ||||||
| Don't ever blink. Well, OK -- don't ever lapse into a coma. You
never know what might happen in six years.
Take, for example, the Orlando Magic. One day, they're young, cocky
and strong, learning the ways of the fast lane. They've got Shaquille
O'Neal and Anfernee Hardaway and Nick Anderson, and they're on the verge
of replacing the itinerant outfielder Michael Jordan. The next, they're all
gone, fleeing Mickeyville East for whatever town will take them, and the
Magic is just another mundane, ground-bound, 82-and-out team nobody notices.
Then you take that six-year nap, and you wake up to learn that Grant
Hill wants to play in Orlando, and maybe Tim Duncan and Tracy McGrady too.
Of course, Magic general manager John Gabriel said Sunday that he
thought Duncan's signing was a longshot, for reasons frankly too tedious to
get into here. This means that Duncan is at least 50-50 to leave Texas for
Florida, if you apply the General Managers' Truth-To-Spoken-Word ratio of
3:5.
More intriguing, though, is the idea that Orlando has suddenly become
the place to be, when six years earlier, it was mostly the place to leave.
And no, this is not a screed decrying Orlando's place in the
firmament. Orlando is a place like any other place, only with more mouse
ears and fewer snowplows. If you live in Orlando and you like it, good for
you. If you live in Orlando and don't like it, move. If you live in Orlando,
don't like it and can't move, well, quelle bummer.
No, this is more about the Magic, who through dint of nothing more
dynamic than clearing a load of cap room and hiring Doc Rivers as coach has
suddenly become the new late-night place to be for your average NBA star.
And Orlando doesn't even stay up that late.
More to the point, the question must be asked -- if that's all it
takes for Orlando to become a player again, what's keeping Cleveland,
Dallas, Denver, Zinc State, the poor side of the Staples Center, New
Jersey, Vancouver and Washington?
Well, we sort of know the answers to all those variants of the same
question, but the point remains the same. The NBA, the most stratified of
professional sports leagues, with less distribution of talent and trophies
than the English Premier League, can be pried open, at least a bit.
True, Orlando hasn't exactly won anything here, except, say, for Grant
Hill, who did the best he could with Detroit. There is actually no
indication that they ever will get Duncan or McGrady. This might, in fact,
be a colossal waste of your time, mitigated only by the fact that you're
reading this at work so you can look busier than you actually are.
All that having been said, the truth remains that the NBA's underest
of underachievers have one less excuse for staying that way. Orlando was
Nowheresville Flats. Then it got kind of cool, then lapsed back into
Nowheresville Heights, and now is cool again.
This puts a clear onus on those other bantamweight teams to either
find a way out of their respective pooch huts, or find a new excuse for
staying in.
I mean, Orlando's an OK enough place, but it's no more glamorous
than, say, Sacramento or Cleveland or Charlotte. It isn't muscling its
way back to the big time on the strength of anything other than the coach's
appeal, the general manager's persuasiveness, and the owner's Promethean wealth.
In other words, playing time, charm and money -- the way it's always
been.
Playing time, of course, is easy. They give it away, like T-shirts,
church keys and bad dance routines.
Charm is slightly harder to come by, although not by so much that it
couldn't be managed. You'd have to be a wet-laundry hamper not to schmooze
someone you're waving money at ... which reminds us of the following
list...
But no, we don't need to get gratuitous here by listing all the people
who couldn't light up a room with a Day-Glo evening gown and a propane
torch. You know who you are, and we know that you know.
The third item is cash, and if you don't have it, you simply can't
play here any more. The good old days weren't all that good, but they sure
were old. Money at least gets you into the breakfast nook.
You'll notice we didn't mention brains here, and we did it
deliberately. We don't know if John Gabriel is the next great NBA genius,
because as we said, all he's done so far is get Grant Hill. Remember the
winter, when we all knew that Jim Bowden was the next great baseball genius
for getting Ken Griffey Jr., to Cincinnati?
Brains come after all the work's been done, and Orlando has only
gotten started. Still, the Magic is in play now, which is more than can be
said for it since 1995.
And far more than can be said for the other dwarves.
Ray Ratto, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. | ALSO SEE Pistons' Hill confirms he'll be Magic's man Magic trick? Duncan staying with Spurs, reports say Stein: This Magic moment Denberg: Magic win first round of free-agent war | |||||