Legendary Orlando Magic executive Pat Williams tells the story of the 1992 NBA draft lottery, at which the clear prize was a 20-year-old center from LSU by the name of Shaquille O’Neal. Georgetown’s Alonzo Mourning was not a bad consolation prize, but beyond those two, the draft was limited. Sitting in a studio in Secaucus, N.J., among 10 other lottery-bound executives, Williams had with him an Orlando Magic jersey with the No. 1 on the front and O’Neal’s name on the back, tucked inside a brown paper bag.

Williams planned to unveil the jersey if the Magic won that lottery. Of course, he notes, the other 10 executives also had O’Neal uniforms on hand and also planned to unveil the jerseys. “One by one, as David Stern was calling off the teams, counting up backwards,” Williams said, “you could hear the crinkling of brown paper bags falling to the floor. They were all dropping their jerseys. We got lucky.”

Go forward 26 years, to the 2018 NBA draft, and once again, good fortune was being proclaimed by the Magic. This time it was team president Jeff Weltman, who was talking about the team drafting center Mo Bamba with the No. 6 overall pick.

“I think we just lucked out,” Weltman told Central Florida radio legend Jerry O’Neill. “Sometimes, better lucky than good, I guess.”

Well, not so much. Certainly, landing Bamba has not quite been 1992-style luck.

In fact, the 2018 draft was one of the unluckier moments in the history of a franchise that has managed its fair share of serendipity over the years. There were two undeniable franchise-cornerstone players slated to go early in the draft—Luka Doncic and Trae Young—and Young went fifth, just out of reach of the Magic.

So Orlando took Bamba, and the results have been discouraging. He has been blocked from serious playing time by recently traded big guy Nikola Vucevic, and this season, he struggled with the aftereffects of a Covid-19 battle. The sum of Bamba’s three years with the Magic: 133 games, 5.6 points, 4.8 rebounds, 14.3 minutes per game. Not so lucky.

Orlando Magic Brass Revives Team’s Future

But give the Magic front office of Weltman and general manager John Hammond credit. Rather than sitting back and lamenting the tough break of Bamba’s injuries and the overall underwhelming performances he has put out, they’ve gone out and made a difficult decision—they would create their own luck.

The Magic started by making the toughest choice first—trading franchise cornerstone Vucevic early on in the trade-deadline-day process. Orlando was criticized for not getting a big enough return in that trade, but that criticism ignores the reality that while Vucevic played well for the Magic, his high-post and deft-passing approach did not appear to be easily translatable to other teams, and his defense was wanting. There was interest, but there was not a huge, tangible market for Vucevic.

Still, with that transaction, the Magic were able to erase a key mistake of the 2018 offseason—the drafting of Bamba. That’s because the headliner in the Vucevic trade was Wendell Carter, Jr., the player the Bulls took seventh in 2018, just behind Bamba. The Bulls were interested in Bamba, in fact, as sources told me at the time, and considered trading up to No. 3 or 4 to get him ahead of the Magic. Instead, the Bulls stayed put and Carter Jr. went to Chicago.

There’s some solace in that for the Magic. They did not have the luck to get Young or Doncic from that 2018 draft, but they now have both Bamba and Carter Jr., with the expectation that at least one of them will reach his full potential and assert himself as a starter.

And Orlando has created so many more opportunities to manufacture some luck after last week’s flurry of moves sent away stalwarts Aaron Gordon and Evan Fournier as well. The Magic could come up with some luck in resurrecting Gary Harris’s career, after acquiring him from the Nuggets for Gordon. They could see rookie guard R.J. Hampton, also coming in from Denver, blossom into a solid player. There could be a sign-and-trade in the offseason with Otto Porter Jr., if the Magic want it.

Markelle Fultz, Cole Anthony, Chuma Okeke, Jonathan Isaac, plus Carter and Hampton—and three incoming first-round selections. There have been some hard times this season for all of those players, but there is also an extremely high ceiling on each of them.

It’ll take some work to get to that ceiling. But it will also take luck. The Magic are trying to make some of their own these days.