ORLANDO – Who better to appreciate the amazing success of the Philadelphia Eagles’ “Brotherly Shove” than a former big-time quarterback?
“And they go to it every time,” Jalen Suggs said Friday, in the Magic’s locker room. “All they’ve got to do is get to a third-and-3, third-and-2, and you know the chains are moving. I can’t believe that, like, there’s conversations about taking it out of the game. You can’t! You can’t! And Tom Brady and them were so good at it as well, and it’s never talked about. Other teams try to replicate it, and they can’t do it.”
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There is irony in Suggs, Orlando’s third-year guard, speaking on how hard it is to replicate something that seemingly is so simple.
The former SMB Wolfpack star QB, and fifth pick in the 2021 NBA draft, has become an integral part of what the Magic have leaned into building the last few years – and which, blessedly, for those of us who like seeing one basketball team put effort into stopping the other, is working so far this season.
Orlando is a disrupter, both in the literal and figurative sense.
On the court, the Magic harass, pester, contest, defend – which is a six-, not four-letter word. The Magic’s relentlessness in dismantling teams’ offensive sets, possession after possession, is central to why Orlando was, entering play Saturday, tied with Miami for fourth place in the Eastern Conference, at 19-12. Considering the Magic have won 40 or more games just once in their previous dozen seasons – and started last season 5-20 before the defensive light clicked the second half of the season – the current record is a significant turn in the right direction.
And it is sand in the gears of the NBA’s front-facing desire to center offense and 3-pointers.
The Magic don’t just shoot the 3 poorly; they are last in the league in 3-point percentage, .332, as they embark on a four-game Western swing, starting Sunday in Phoenix. They take and make the fewest 3s in the league, and are the only team that averages fewer than 10 made 3s a game.
Orlando doesn’t win with offensive pyrotechnics; it wins with defense, and with using its considerable length to good advantage at the other end to score at the elbows and in the paint. Paolo Banchero continues to bully-ball most teams that single cover him. He is a slightly taller Julius Randle, as was on display Friday, when the Knicks and Magic picked at one another for 48 minutes in a very entertaining tilt, won by Orlando, 117-106, before a record crowd of 19,587 at Kia Center. Franz Wagner continued to make an All-Star case with 32 points and nine rebounds.
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And, defensively, Suggs and rookie guard Anthony Black harassed Jalen Brunson into 4-of-15 shooting from the floor.
This was the first possession of the game. Tones are set in the opening minutes; an offensive player who gets to the basket easily and scores off the rip tends to be very hard to slow down over 48 minutes. Conversely, the effort that Suggs displayed on Brunson from the jump suggests, “Strap in; you’re gonna have a long night.”
Entering play Saturday, the Magic were tied with Oklahoma City for third in the league in Defensive Rating, at 110.4. They were fifth in defensive points allowed per game, 110.6. And even that belies the Magic being pretty pedestrian in opponent field goal percentage (16th) and opponent free throw attempts/game (25th). (Also, part of Orlando’s defense success comes from its ability to draw fouls on offense; the Magic lead the league in free throw attempts per game, at 27.5 – which allows the Magic to get set at the other end.)
Individually, though, Orlando gets after it.
Suggs is the lead harasser. He’s third in the league in Dunks and Threes’ Estimated Defensive Plus-Minus, generally considered one of the more reliable individual defensive metrics, at +3.5, tied with the 76ers’ Joel Embiid and the Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo. Only OKC’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander rates higher defensively among guards, at +3.8. But multiple Magic names dot EDPM. There’s center Goga Bitadze, who’s started 21 games after Wendell Carter, Jr., broke a left finger early in the season, right behind Suggs, at +3.3, good for seventh-best in the league. Forward Jonathan Isaac is at +2.2, in the 94th percentile league wide. Black, at 1.8, is in the 92nd percentile. Carter is in the 85th percentile (+1.1).
In an age where defense is never centered on social media or on the morning cable yakathons, a team – and one, especially, whose key players are as young as Orlando’s – that celebrates its ability to get multiple stops, and highlights multiple effort plays on defense, flips conventional wisdom on its head.
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“I’m sure it isn’t normal, but believe it or not, we expect it,” Banchero said. “We have guys on this team who’ve been winners their whole life. Myself, Jalen, Franz, Mo (Wagner), Cole (Anthony) – these guys have won gold medals, conference championships. We’ve all been to the Final Four, you know what I’m saying?
“So it’s a lot of guys who, we’ve won all our lives. So when we all get together, especially starting from last year, you look at each other and you’re like, ‘Why can’t we be a top-four seed, a top-three seed in the East?’ We’ve got a bunch of winners over here. So I think it’s just a testament to the way they’ve been able to put this group of guys together, get us all to play together.”
Offensively, Suggs doesn’t need to shoulder the offensive load with Banchero and Franz Wagner around. But he no longer plays himself off the floor with bad shooting. In two-plus seasons, he’s improved his 3-point shooting from an abysmal .214 his rookie season to its current, more-than-acceptable .365. He made the clinching shot Friday to put New York away. And he’s finally healthy, after a slew of injuries – a fractured thumb, fractured ankle, sprained knee, and more – cost him 63 games his first two seasons.
The game, Magic coach Jamahl Mosley said Friday, is slowing down for Suggs. And the Magic have managed, at least so far, to make what seemed like a logjam at guard work, finding minutes not just for Suggs and Black, this year’s first-round pick, but also Anthony and Gary Harris, too. (Orlando would also like to incorporate Markelle Fultz, but he’s again on the shelf, having played just five games so far this season dealing with knee tendinitis.)
“You see when (Suggs) comes over at some of the timeouts, his conversations about what he’s seeing and recognizing,” Mosley said. “‘Hey, they’re playing Paolo like this; if I come set this screen, then I’ll be open here.’ Or, ‘they’re doing this on the backside.’ He’s registering and recognizing what’s happening in the game. And for a young player to realize it, (in) real time, says a lot.
“So when he’s making moves, he’s registering where the help’s coming from. He understands who’s going to be open. And I think those are great signs of growth, that you can slow the game down, real time, and be able to communicate exactly what that is.”
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
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Can I start with something not involving your team? You played with Cade Cunningham on the U.S. team that won the gold medal at the FIBA Under-19 World Cup in Greece in 2019. You know him well. You were both high Lottery picks in 2021. Can you fathom losing 28 straight games?
We’ve had some tough runs here, but 28 is a lot. Twenty-eight is a lot.
You text him during this streak?
Man, I hit him up, we talk whenever we see each other. We have a pretty cool relationship. We got close that summer we went to Greece, and our families got pretty close. Just motivation. There’s not much you can say about it, really, to be honest. They’re just kind of stuck in that blender right now.
As you noted, your first year-and-a-half here was rough. The injuries were the biggest part of that for you, of course. But how do you find balance when you’re going through an extended rough patch like Detroit is?
It’s tough, because you’ve got to just control what you can, and do your best to continue motivating guys. But when you’re losing for, like, two weeks straight, it’s like, man, it don’t look like there’s no sunshine over the hill. It gets tough. That’s when you’ve really got to dig in and lock into details. Because teams aren’t going to come out and just give one to you. And now, they don’t want to be the team to lose to them (the Pistons). That makes it tough.
What did you fall back on the first two years? After your success at Gonzaga, I’m sure it was a shock to the system.
It really took me until this summer, honestly. I couldn’t disconnect myself from basketball, and from the games. And I think that was my biggest problem. I would have a tough game, or we’d have a loss, and I wouldn’t stop thinking about it, or stop thinking about how I could have corrected those mistakes, and being so hard on myself, until the next game. And by that time, now I had to fully get ready for another team. But I was still stuck on that past game. It just continued to snowball. So really, until this summer, (when I) just disconnected myself from basketball, and put it as something that I do, not who I am. Being an NBA player wasn’t who I was anymore. It was just a hobby, and a sport I played. Being a good person, being a child of God, and really leaning on those things, and my values, really have helped me get past that, finally.
Why was that separation necessary for you?
I think it’s very easy to lose yourself when you become such a product of your environment, and what you think the NBA life is, and who you’re supposed to be as an NBA player. You get stuck in that blender of hearing you’re this or that, whether it’s social media, from family, from friends, coaches and different things like that. If someone’s coming at you.
You can’t disassociate and you can’t get away from the game; you’re here, we’re here six months out of the year. And that can really be a long six months if you can’t separate your life, and you as a person, and the game. Because that’s what it was growing up. You just wanted to hoop. Because it was fun. Because it was competitive. Because you wanted to get better. I think, for me, when I got here, it was constantly chasing this player, chasing that player. I’m not living up to this standard or that standard – that other people are setting. Not my, internally, what I want to do. So I just kind of got caught in that. It took a lot of soul-searching, a lot of looks in the mirror and answering tough questions this summer, to finally separate the two.
Once you made that choice, how did you lean back into basketball?
I wanted to be great for myself. I think the biggest thing for me was, I love impacting others. I love talking to kids, and, you know, being the image and being somebody that people can look up to. And especially where I come from. So, for me, I’m really big into psychology, and I want to, one day, get into that field.
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But I couldn’t help people and look them in the face and tell them to do something that I hadn’t done in my own life. I think that was one of the biggest motivating factors. If I’m going to tell others to do this or do that, and be a voice of motivation and something like that, then I had to go through it personally. So I really just decided, with the help of Coach Nate (Tibbetts, who left the Magic in October to coach the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury), Randy (Gregory), and Corey (Hawkins, one of Orlando’s player development coaches), I just said, I want to do this. Whatever you guys have for me, however you guys can make me better, I’m going to do it, no questions asked. And it helped me fall in love with the game again, honestly. Once I separated from it, I wanted to come back to it, and I was yearning to learn, and to keep growing and getting better.
Is that separating the process of trying to improve from the results on the floor?
Yes. I think separating the end goal of the journey from the journey. That’s where the beauty is. Days when you’re on a back-to-back, or days when you’ve worked out four days in a row, hard, and you want to take a light one off, and not go into the gym, and maybe go kick it a little bit, let off some steam. Those are the moments in the journey that are the most beautiful. The end goal is just the finish line. It’s just something for you to constantly chase. But if you’re so focused on that, you’re missing all the signs, and all the learning moments, all the moments to celebrate, on that way to that. And I think I got too fixated on that part of it, and then I lost the journey.
But, you’ve got to win some. Especially when you’re used to winning.
Yes.
At every level.
Yes. That was really hard. But you look at some of the best teams, or some of the best players in this league, and they’ve all lost. You look at MJ. He has the perfect finals (record), but before he got there, it was a tough road of getting beat up, of losses, of trying to find ways to make that shift to become that (championship) organization. You’ve got to find wins, and they’re going to come. But I feel like if you look too far at those, you lose the work that’s going to get you there.
How did y’all stay on this path of winning with defense? ‘Cause that’s just not what most teams talk about any more.
A lot of it came from our coaching staff, honestly. I give them a lot of credit. Because in training camp, and leading up to it, it was all about being in the best shape you can be in. And defensively, we want to be one of the best teams. We have guys in here – myself, JI. Really, everyone takes pride in defense. They don’t want to get picked on. Even down to CA (Anthony). We’ve had conversations about how he’s tired of being pulled into actions, and he doesn’t want to always switch, and have to show. He wants to get stops. And I think that mentality is shared all around. And plus what the coaches told us – this is something we’re going to hang our hats on. Offensively, it’s going to come and go, because it’s a make-miss league. But defensively is something that, every night, you can make sure happens, regardless of whether the ball goes in or not.
Did you worry about the numbers at the guard position here?
I definitely did. It was right after the draft, right after they drafted AB and Jett (Howard). Everyone kept hitting me up; they drafted two more guards, and this and that. And they’re family and friends. They mean well, but ‘you guys have too many guards over there.’ For me, it was kind of a wakeup call. This is not promised. And being in this position, in this sport, and in this league, is not promised. And there’s always a replacement coming.
For me, it was a motivation to get better. It was also motivation to help them battle through the things that I just went through, my first two years. Because I don’t want nobody else to experience being that low, or being in that tough of a mindset. For me, it was motivation, getting back here. I wanted to work with these guys, and I wanted to get better. And I wanted to take some of the things they do really well. From watching a lot more film of Franz, and being in the gym with AB, and workouts, and just seeing how he moves, how he thinks, it’s helped me not only become closer and get some better continuity (with them) on the floor, but elevate my game, too.
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Y’all are so young. Who are your old heads here?
I mean, I call Joe (Ingles) Grandpa. Before that, I was calling T Ross (guard Terrence Ross) Grandpa, and he was only 30. Joe, definitely, and Gary. And I think, even, I look at Markelle in that. He’s really young, but just life experience, and experience through this league, and what he’s seen. … just asking (them) not only about hooping advice, but life advice.
Will you disconnect from social media?
It’s funny. I really don’t like social media. But I was caught in it. I always had to look my name up after games. Whatever we were doing. At least once a day. Just to see what people were saying. It’s just very unhealthy. Because it’s a place where people go to kind of just get things off of their minds, spread false narratives. Just so (impure). If I wasn’t in this profession and I didn’t have to have it for my image and all that, I would not have it. I tell the boys all the time, I’m going back to my pager era — I’m going to get a pager, a beeper.
What would you tell then-19-year-old Jalen, who hit that legendary shot in Indy at the Final Four in 2021 to beat UCLA, about how to best navigate the years that were about to follow?
I would tell myself, do not lose the joy and emotion you felt – not only that night, but that season, with those guys. That’s something you can easily lose in this league, and guys come in and out of teams, and trades. You play so many games. You’re not so emotionally or mentally attached to each one, as you are in a college season.
You’re around those guys all summer, all fall, you go to school, you practice for hours together. You guys are kind of each other’s lives. I would tell myself, don’t lose that joy and that emotion. Because it’s a lot of who I am as a person, and I lost it trying to conform into this league, and being an NBA player.
(Photo of Jalen Suggs: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)
