On their very first offensive possession of Game 4 on Monday night, the Detroit Pistons did what every big man–turned-commentator suggests every team do on its first possession: They ran a play to get their center a post-up. In this case, Duncan Robinson backscreened Wendell Carter Jr., forcing Desmond Bane to switch onto Jalen Duren. Duren had borne the lion's share of blame for the Pistons' embarrassing performance through the first three games of the series, a stretch spent not only getting outschemed and outclassed by a team that had seemed incapable of doing either against anyone all season, but also getting out-banged and out-hustled. The entire value proposition of the Pistons is that with their collective physicality, particularly the explosive muscularity of Duren, nobody can bully them. Best to get him rolling early.
But no. The Magic knew exactly what Detroit's plan was, and Bane snuffed it out for a steal. They then marched down the court, and Carter Jr. splashed a wide-open three. This sequence was the series in miniature: The Pistons straining to complete the simplest of actions while Orlando bludgeoned them into easy submission; Detroit playing neolithic offense while the Magic showed an understanding of the modern game, where centers space the floor instead of cosplaying paint-bound bigs of old. Orlando won Game 4, 94-88, to take a totally deserved 3-1 lead over the East's No. 1 seed.
Much of the discourse on this series has focused on Detroit's seeming inability to play even notionally functional NBA offense. That's fair: The Pistons are the one seed, after all. But equally surprising has been the extent to which the Magic have turned around a season from hell and straight-up outplayed the Pistons in every facet of the game. It's been a great, coherent series performance from a team that was visibly annoyed with its doomed coach and seemed incapable of doing anything correctly, right up through the first play-in game.
Some of this is health. As fraudulent as they looked coming into the playoffs, the Magic almost never had their full team this year, which required Paolo Banchero to shoulder most of the shot-creation load. Banchero is a big, skilled wing, but if he gets the ball without a clear advantage already created for him, he will either stand perfectly still for three full seconds while the defense gets into position, or wriggle his way into the worst midrange jumper you've ever seen, or the former followed by the latter. But when he plays with both Franz Wagner and Jalen Suggs, Banchero is almost forced to play fast, which unlocks everything for Orlando. Wagner in particular is critical to Orlando's offense, because he's comfortable attacking both smaller, quicker players and bigger, slower ones.
The most surprising thing about Orlando's muddy season was the Magic's defensive regression, and the most impressive facet of their playoff performance is the degree to which they have nullified everything the Pistons want to do. Suggs and Bane have hounded the Pistons' guards on the perimeter, and Carter has stood Duren up. Wagner and Banchero have nothing to do but help out off of the bad offensive players they're charged with guarding, further gumming up Detroit's anoxic spacing. This is a nasty group, with size and athleticism advantages over most opponents. They have kept the Pistons from scoring in transition and have matched them on the glass. Detroit's stupid offense—built more or less without ballhandlers or shooters—is unbelievably reliant on those two phases of the game, and without them, the Pistons' only options are to have Cade Cunningham work as hard as anyone has ever worked for his buckets or, alternatively, let Tobias Harris dribble the ball for 17 seconds before trying to draw a foul.
I should stress that while Orlando has won three games in this series, the Magic are not playing the beautiful game either. They shot 33 percent from the floor on Monday, only faintly worse than the 40.9 mark they managed in the first three games. Banchero went 4-for-18 on a diet of his beloved contested midrange jumpers. With Anthony Black still working his way back from an abdominal strain, Orlando's bench situation is pretty grim, though Jamal Cain did throw down the dunk of the playoffs on Duren in the fourth quarter.
Orlando is beating Detroit in a mirror match of '90s stylistic revanche. The Magic are getting slightly better shots and shooting slightly better on those shots, but the operative factor in their success is that they dictating the spatial terms of engagement. In other words, they are out-beefing Detroit. Everyone is running around and hitting people. I don't mind that stuff as much, though the point is this: The key to Orlando's success is less that they are playing improved basketball than that playoff basketball suits their preferred style.
Alas, it might get worse. Franz Wagner, who has been Orlando's best player in the series, missed the entire fourth quarter of Game 4 with what the team called right calf soreness. That's worrisome: Wagner is only now getting back into good form after missing most of February and all of March with a sprained left ankle, which is related to with the ankle injury that kept him out of the second half of January, the ankle injury that kept him out of most of December and the first half of January, and the ankle and knee injuries he suffered last year, and might be related to the ankle injuries he suffered throughout the 2022-23 season. When Wagner is healthy, you can start to see the vision for Orlando as a Conference Finals contender. Maybe this calf thing is nothing, and maybe he can elevate the Magic back to that level at the last second, should they win this series. They can do it without Wagner, but it won't be pretty.
