Jalen Suggs spent Monday night where he’s been far too often in his career: on the sideline, watching the Magic try to solve another problem without him.
Orlando dropped its fourth straight home game to open the season, falling 103-94 to the Wizards at Kia Center, and Suggs could only observe as the team kept grinding through injuries under new coach Sean Sweeney. The sixth-year guard is still working back from a right knee bone bruise suffered Oct. 25 at New York, and he said his approach hasn’t changed.
“It’s my path,” Suggs told the Orlando Sentinel before the game. “I mean, I can’t complain about it.
So, it’s the same process for me whether I’m playing or not. I wake up and I come to work.
And for me, that’s fun. I enjoy that.
Because I’m getting better. It’s nothing different for me.”
He added: “Obviously, there’s a little frustration,” Suggs added. “I’d love to be playing, but I (am not) complaining about (anything).”
The Magic could use him, and they could use a whole lot more help. Paolo Banchero, Noah Penda, Jonathan Isaac, Izaiyah Nelson and Anthony Black were all out, leaving Orlando without major pieces of its rotation and forcing the team to lean heavily on Franz Wagner and Desmond Bane.
That shortage showed up everywhere. Washington’s Anthony Davis, Trae Young, Kyshawn George and No. 1 pick AJ Dybantsa all had room to operate, and the Wizards made Orlando pay.
Davis finished with 27 points and nine rebounds on 12-for-17 shooting in 34 minutes. George hit four 3s on his way to 22 points.
Dybantsa added 21 points, five rebounds and three steals. Young chipped in 15 points and nine assists.
Wagner led the Magic with 24 points, while Bane scored 20. After that, the offense thinned out quickly. Five other Orlando players finished in single digits, the team shot just 11-for-39 from 3-point range, and 18 turnovers turned into 22 Washington points.
Wagner and Bane did their part, combining to shoot 18-for-35 from the field. The rest of the roster went 19-for-45.
“We are shorthanded,” Magic center Nikola Vucevic said in the locker room after game. “That’s not an excuse but we’ve got to figure some stuff out with having guys out how to make life easier, especially for Franz and Desmond, because they’re getting definitely more pressured.”
Orlando now heads right back out on the road for a four-game West Coast trip that starts Thursday in Phoenix and continues through Golden State, Sacramento and Utah. Black is expected back after sitting out the second night of the back-to-back, but Suggs won’t be re-evaluated until Monday. Banchero is still less than two weeks removed from the high ankle sprain that typically takes four to six weeks to rehabilitate.
Suggs said he doesn’t have a timeline yet, and he isn’t even sure whether he’ll travel with the team this week.
“I don’t even know, to be honest,” he said. “But my process has been the exact same as it was before camp started - making sure I handle my business every day, making sure I’m watching games, making sure I come in, get my work in (and) making sure I’m improving every day so that when the time is right, I come out and I’m ready to hoop.”
The bigger issue for Orlando is that it can’t keep waiting for reinforcements to fix what’s gone wrong. The Magic are 2-5, and the problems are already clear: shaky 3-point shooting, trouble on the glass and too many turnovers.
“We’ve just got to continue to work on it, figure it out and just move on,” Vucevic said. “Every team goes through it at some point throughout the year.
It’s tough when it happens at the beginning, especially when you’re trying to work some things out and have a new coach and all that, but it’s part of it. It’s on us to figure it out and I think we still have enough to do that.
So, hopefully we can regroup and do a better job on this trip.”
There may be some relief in the schedule, at least on paper. After Saturday’s game at Golden State, Orlando’s next five games include four opponents that had only one win as of Tuesday night. Phoenix, Sacramento, Utah and Milwaukee were a combined 4-22 after Monday.
Still, the Magic believe they’re close to putting it together.
“At times it looks really good where we know what we’re doing and we’re executing really well,” Vucevic said. “At (other) times, not so much.
And I think when it’s not really going our way, we get a little hesitant. We overthink things.
But I feel like in most games we’ve lost, except for like the one in Toronto where got blown out, we’re kind of like right there.
“But we’ve still stuck with it. We still fought all the way. We just came up short, and we’ve just got to continue to work.”
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Orlando is still trying to settle into a new system, and the staff believes some of the sloppiness should ease as the group gets more comfortable together. Even so, the Magic understand this is not a small early hiccup, because every extra possession they give away makes it harder to build rhythm on offense or recover on the other end. The hope is that cleaner handling arrives gradually, but the urgency to fix it is already there. [Read more 🡒]