ORLANDO, Fla. — Jalen Suggs says he’s sorry.
And you know what?
Apology accepted.
Now, Jalen, can you and your Orlando Magic teammates please do us all one gigantic favor?
Stay freaking healthy.
Seriously, is that too much to ask?
At Magic Media Day a few weeks ago, Suggs offered a heartfelt apology to Orlando fans for last season’s epic playoff collapse against the Detroit Pistons. He spoke with the sincerity and emotion we’ve come to expect from a player who wears his heart on his sleeve, his passion on his jersey and occasionally his entire body on the hardwood.
“For the fans and the city, I feel like we let them down,” Suggs said. “We blew it. It was a misrepresentation of who I am and who we are as a team. And this is a public apology. That was unacceptable. We talk about standards that we want to uphold and the places we want to go, and (the playoff collapse) was not representative of that.”
Good for him. It was refreshing to hear a professional athlete take responsibility instead of hiding behind the usual collection of sports clichés about adversity, learning experiences and trusting the process.
But here’s the thing, Jalen. Magic fans don’t need another apology. They need an entire season of you, Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner and Desmond Bane actually playing basketball together.
Imagine that. A basketball team whose best players actually play basketball. What a revolutionary concept!
As the Magic prepare to open their season Wednesday night against the Atlanta Hawks, there is once again optimism surrounding a franchise that has spent years selling hope, promise and potential. And, frankly, it’s time to start delivering something more substantial.
Quite frankly, last last spring wasn’t just disappointing. It was downright disgraceful.
The Magic had the top-seeded Detroit Pistons on the ropes, leading their playoff series three games to one. They were poised to pull off a monumental upset and announce their arrival as legitimate Eastern Conference contenders. Instead, they performed one of the great disappearing acts in Orlando sports history.
They blew a 24-point second-half lead in Game 6, during which they missed 23 consecutive shots, and then completed their collapse in Game 7. Seriously, 23 straight misses! I’ve seen better shooting at a county fair basketball booth where the rims are bent and the balls are overinflated.
Suggs talked about barely leaving the house for weeks after the embarrassment because he didn’t want to show his face around town.
“It took a while for me to let it go,” said Suggs, who hit 3 of 19 shots and 1 of 10 3s in the final two games of the Pistons series “Actually, I still haven’t really let it go, and it’s I think that’s still kind of driving a lot of the fire inside of me.”
The meltdown cost coach Jamahl Mosley his job. Mosley was a good man and a good coach who helped drag this franchise out of basketball irrelevance. But professional sports are a results business, and when a team blows a 3-1 playoff lead in such spectacular fashion, somebody usually gets handed a cardboard box and shown the exit.
Enter Sean Sweeney, the Magic’s new coach, who arrives with a reputation for defensive intelligence, player development and holding people accountable. Wonderful. But unless Sweeney also happens to possess a medical degree, a miracle-working massage therapist and the ability to wrap his players in industrial-strength bubble wrap, his coaching genius might not matter.
Because the biggest question facing the Magic isn’t whether Sweeney can design a better offense or instill a tougher mentality. It’s whether this team’s most important players can remain healthy long enough to develop some actual continuity.
Let’s be honest, if Wagner had not injured his calf and missed the final three games of the Pistons series, the Magic almost certainly would have advanced into the second round and perhaps even contended for a title.
That’s the maddening part about the Magic. We’ve seen enough flashes to know they’re talented. Banchero can be a superstar. Wagner can be an All-Star. Bane can provide the shooting this team desperately needs. And Suggs, when he’s healthy and attacking the game like an angry pit bull, can be one of the NBA’s most disruptive defensive guards.
But those tantalizing possibilities come with an enormous asterisk — *When healthy.
Those two words have become the most aggravating phrase in the Magic vocabulary. When healthy, they can beat anybody. When healthy, they can compete with the best teams in the East. When healthy, they can make a deep playoff run.
Well, enough already. At some point, “when healthy” becomes the basketball equivalent of “the check is in the mail.”
Nobody is accusing Suggs or Wagner of lacking toughness. Injuries happen. Bodies break down. Basketball is a brutal, physically demanding sport. But the Magic have invested too much money, too much time and too much organizational faith in this core to spend another season wondering what might have been.
The team’s training staff, medical personnel, coaches and players must collectively find a way to manage the physical demands of an 82-game marathon. Because the Eastern Conference isn’t going to wait around for Orlando to get healthy. Neither are Magic fans.
“Everybody is making the leap in the weight room, before practice and after practice about how intentional and how detailed we are in injury prevention and taking care of our muscles and tendons,” Suggs says. “We don’t want injuries to be the narrative. These windows are so short. After your career is over, you don’t want to look back and say injuries are part of the reason why you didn’t achieve what you wanted to achieve.”
This franchise has reached the point where simply making the playoffs is no longer a meaningful accomplishment. The rebuild is over. The honeymoon is over. The participation trophies have been put away. Now comes the hard part: winning when it matters.
Which brings us back to Suggs and his apology. I believe him. I believe he and his teammates were embarrassed by what happened against Detroit. I believe he cares deeply about Orlando and desperately wants to make things right.
But the best apology isn’t delivered behind a microphone in September. It’s delivered on the court in April and May. It’s delivered by staying available, playing with purpose and refusing to let another promising season dissolve into another painful postseason autopsy.
Wednesday night against Atlanta is just one game. It won’t erase the embarrassment of Detroit, but it can mark the beginning of something different. Something better. And, yes, something healthier.
So thank you, Jalen Suggs, for the genuine apology. Now please, for the love of everything holy in the Magic Kingdom, let’s have fewer injury reports, fewer excuses and fewer what-ifs.
For once, let’s see what this team can actually accomplish when everybody shows up for work.
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