ORLANDO, Fla. — The faces on the Orlando Magic’s bench with 1:40 remaining in the fourth quarter Friday told the story almost as much as the scoreboard did. Jett Howard, Franz Wagner, Jamal Cain, Moe Wagner, Noah Penda, Goga Bitadze and Wendell Carter Jr. all sat stone-faced, in seeming disbelief about what they and their teammates on the court were experiencing.
The NBA has existed for 79 years.
What happened Friday night had never happened before.
After staking themselves to a 24-point lead early in the third quarter of Game 6 against the Detroit Pistons, with an opportunity to become the seventh No. 8 seed to upset a No. 1 seed right then and there, the Magic collapsed and, in the process, produced the lowest-scoring half in league playoff history.
The Magic scored only 19 points in the second half.
On their home floor.
And they lost the game, 93-79.
“I think they were just playing more desperate than us, playing harder than us,” Magic shooting guard Desmond Bane said. “Whether it was offensive rebounds or heating up their pressure to get steals, it really kind of took us out of our stuff, messed with our flow. I mean, it’s going to be hard to win games (when) you score 19 points in a half, and I thought a lot of that was because they came out with more energy than us in the second half.”
The 2025-26 Magic have many admirable characteristics when they are healthy, including an outstanding defense and a rugged physicality matched by few teams other than the Pistons. Those qualities helped Orlando enter Friday’s game with a 3-2 series lead.
But that is only part of who the Magic are. They cannot count on their half-court offense. They rank among the league’s worst 3-point shooting teams. And, without a capable traditional point guard to guide them, their offense all too often devolves into aimless drives to the hoop in the hopes of drawing a foul. Wide-open misses are a Magic staple.
Those deficiencies on offense — ones amplified by forward Franz Wagner’s absence because of a right-calf strain — threaten to doom them in Game 7 on Sunday afternoon in Detroit. Only 13 teams in NBA history have lost a best-of-seven series after leading that series 3-1.
This collapse was not quite an isolated incident. On March 29 in Toronto, the Magic allowed the Raptors to go on a 31-0 run that bridged the first and second quarters, the longest unanswered scoring run since the start of the play-by-play era in the 1997-98 season.
What made Friday different, however, were the stakes. Orlando has not won any playoff series since 2010, back when the team employed a starting lineup of Jameer Nelson, Vince Carter, Matt Barnes, Rashard Lewis and Dwight Howard.
This season’s Magic have now squandered two opportunities to close out this series. In Game 5 in Detroit, they made only 16 of their 30 free-throw attempts and allowed the Pistons to collect 16 offensive rebounds. The Magic lost that winnable game 116-109.
Game 6 felt so much worse.
The Magic dominated the second quarter, outscoring the Pistons 35-12, and took a 60-38 lead into halftime. Even in a league where few leads are safe because of the 3-point shot, that margin should have been almost insurmountable. Coach Jamahl Mosley’s squads entered Friday with an 8-1 postseason record at the Kia Center. According to ESPN, when Cade Cunningham turned the ball over with 11:02 remaining in the third quarter and Orlando ahead 62-38, Orlando had a 97.9 percent probability of winning the game.
The Magic built a 62-38 lead early in the third quarter. (Jeremy Reper / Imagn Images)
“I think they just turned up their defensive pressure, and I think we just got caught on our heels, and then game pressure builds,” Magic forward Paolo Banchero said. “Yeah, they went on a pretty big run there, and we didn’t score.”
Note how Banchero referenced “game pressure,” which, of course, is a nice, professional way of referring to choking a game away.
The Magic scored 11 points in the third quarter and eight points in the fourth quarter. Neither was an NBA playoff record for the fewest points in its specific quarter, but the Magic’s 19 second-half points were the lowest playoff point total ever by a team in any half. The previous record was 23 points, set by four different teams, all of which were playing on the road. The Magic were in their home arena.
“We changed the amount of pressure that we were putting at the point of attack,” Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff said. “We changed how active we were on the ball, how physical we were on the ball. And, again, that’s when we’re at our best.”
In the fourth quarter, Orlando made only one of its 20 field-goal attempts, and that was a dunk by Banchero with 2:24 remaining. Before that dunk, the Magic had missed 23 consecutive shots.
“I thought we had good looks, and I thought we had some rushed looks,” Mosley said.
Orlando played, and lost, a first-round Game 7 two years ago on the road against the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Magic took an 18-point lead in that game with 4:17 remaining in the second quarter. They then made only six of their next 30 shot attempts and turned the ball over seven times over the next 16 minutes, 16 seconds.
But even then, the Magic scored 19 points during that span.
On Friday against the Pistons, the Magic managed only 19 points in 24 minutes.
Banchero finished with 17 points on 4-of-20 shooting. Jalen Suggs went 1 of 10 from the field, with seven assists but also five turnovers. Carter scored nine points and had two blocks, but he did not collect a single rebound.
A few minutes after the final buzzer, after many Magic fans had trudged out of the Kia Center, some Pistons fans who remained in the lower bowl yelled, “”DEEE-troit Basketball!” That mimicked the famous call of the Pistons’ beloved longtime public-address announcer, John Mason.
In a sign of how much the Game 6 loss pained Magic players, Carter declined to speak with reporters after the game, which is very unlike him. Suggs was nowhere to be seen in the locker room after Mosley, Bane and Banchero each answered questions in a news-conference room. That, too, was uncharacteristic of Suggs.
They knew how close they had come to winning the game, and to winning the series.
Now comes a road Game 7, and all the pressure that entails.
“This team always shows fight,” Mosley said. “There’s no other way to put it: This does suck. You know, you have a 24-point lead, and we let it go, and I think that the reality is it’s got to sting, and it’s got to hurt right now. But you’ve got to be able to bounce back, and you’ve given yourself an opportunity to go get it done in Game 7.”
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