Orlando Magic put Toronto Raptors’ lack of direction into focus

The architecture of the Toronto Raptors and Orlando Magic are similar. They are built around multi-skilled, playmaking forwards, and they are trying to figure out the rest on the fly. Intentional or not, that is the form both teams have taken.

The Raptors have Scottie Barnes , Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby . The Magic have Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner . The Raptors would seem to have more immediate winning potential based on those players. How you feel about the future depends on how you feel about the upside of the three youngest players: Barnes and the Magic pair.

However, the Magic have been the better team this season, at least so far, and finished with roughly the same record in the final 60 games last season. When you line up the organizations side by side, it is easy to ask: What, exactly, are the Raptors doing here? The Magic’s 126-107 win over the Raptors on Tuesday encouraged those thoughts, but they had already been brewing. It was one of the Raptors’ most listless performances of the season, but they have had a few of those over the past two seasons against the Magic. Banchero had 25 points and five rebounds for Orlando.

The Magic came into the game as the only team with a better defensive rating and worse offensive rating than the Raptors. Whether that is a coincidence or evidence of a shared basketball ideology between Raptors president Masai Ujiri and Orlando president Jeff Weltman, his old top lieutenant, is up to the observer. Either way, both teams are built similarly and are stylistically alike. The younger Magic have been the superior team this season, even as they figure out which pieces will be long-term fits around their young stars. If not for comeback wins against two of the league’s doormats, the San Antonio Spurs and Washington Wizards , the Raptors would be 4-10 and the vultures would be circling.

As it is, with Siakam and Anunoby heading toward free agency, this feels like a march to an inevitable splintering at or before the trade deadline. After all, here is the kicker: Even if the Raptors wanted to make a move to give their trio of forwards another chance to thrive together, Toronto has three of its own NBA Draft picks outgoing and none incoming. The Magic, meanwhile, have extra picks , plus more promising prospects than the Raptors, to use in a possible trade.

Time expiring on this group has been the lingering worry with the Raptors, who have not found a single player who can confidently excel in their role around the forwards. The Magic might not have their lead guard of the future, but Jalen Suggs and Cole Anthony are, at the very least, rotation-quality players. Anthony Black is the tools-y lottery pick from this past draft whom they are trying to place within their ecosystem, but the pressure isn’t on him to figure it all out while Wagner and Banchero do the bulk of creation in the starting unit. He also has a guard with some experience to help organize things. That is to say nothing of Markelle Fultz , the usual starter, who missed the game with a knee injury.

Thanks to the Raptors’ developmental struggles , they do not have the same foundation. There is hope that the 13th pick from June’s draft, Gradey Dick , will become one of those players. He has had a rough start to the season, although that should do little to diminish his future prospects. Save for Fultz, all the players mentioned above were top-15 picks by the Magic. Amassing those players required a lot of losing, which was not fun, but it has insulated their most important players. Meanwhile, the Raptors have tried to fix their holes through free agency and trades. Their bench lineups were bad last year, and they’ve been largely bad again this season.

It is not as if the Raptors are an outright bad team. They just have a hard cap on their short-term success, with big-picture questions approaching quickly. The Magic? Their future is wide open. The present is intriguing, too.

• Did you enjoy meaningful In-Season Tournament games, Raptors fans? With Tuesday’s loss, the Raptors are 0-2 with a minus-22 point differential. Technically, they could finish in a five-way tie with a quartet of 2-2 teams, which means the Raptors could still win their group and advance to the quarterfinals. Realistically, their games Friday against the Chicago Bulls and Tuesday at the Brooklyn Nets will just be normal regular-season games with no extra meaning.

• Tournament wrinkle: Orlando coach Jamahl Mosley gave Chuma Okeke the go-ahead to take a 3 on the Magic’s final possession because of the importance of point differential, and Raptors coach Darko Rajaković appeared to understand.

• The Raptors came into the game ranked 19th in turnover percentage, which they cannot afford given their shooting limitations. If they were all in the name of crisp movement, that would be one thing. Some of them are just sloppy, like Barnes passing to Anunoby with no room in semi-transition, or Dennis Schröder trying a diagonal entry bounce pass to Siakam. Those are just rough decisions, and they led to five early Orlando points. The Raptors had 24 turnovers, which took the punch out of their 14-for-28 night from 3-point range.

• Suggs played with tons of fire Tuesday. That is genuinely how he plays, but I’m sure playing the Raptors, the team that was widely expected to take him with the fourth pick in 2021, didn’t hurt in terms of motivation. The Raptors took Barnes, which is working out OK. Suggs’ attempted block of a Siakam dunk attempt , which was rightly called a foul, was an awesome play I’d love to see more of around the league.

Suggs was awesome, and he was letting everyone know about it. Hard to hold it against him.

• Considering the opponent, this was the Raptors’ worst defensive performance of the season. They were terrible in transition and not physical enough when navigating screens . Enjoy playing the run-and-gun Indiana Pacers on Wednesday, guys.

• Not that the starters were good, but the Raptors’ bench gave them absolutely nothing.

(Photo of Magic forward Franz Wagner and OG Anunoby: Kim Klement Neitzel / USA Today)