So … what exactly happens now for the Orlando Magic?

Has an NBA team played a game and, less than 12 hours later, traded 80% of its starting team?

Because that is exactly what the Orlando Magic did on Thursday, with Michael Carter-Williams being the sole remaining player in Magic’s victory over the Suns on Wednesday night.

Magic performed it for years, and then blew it up in minutes. The board gave one-way tickets out of the city to a trio that had been together in Orlando since 2014, sending Nikola Vucevic to Chicago, Evan Fournier to Boston and Aaron Gordon to Denver.

Photo by Sam Greenwood / Getty Images

The core was disassembled. With good reason, since this nucleus is on an endless path to nowhere.

The shocking part is not the dismantling itself – however shocking an unexpected double All-Star may have been sent for packing – the Magic has very little of a tangible nature to show compared to what they gave up on. This is by no means to say that the negotiations were a failure, because they were not.

But you can’t buy a Traded Player Exception shirt. Well, I think technically you can have one made and it would be really funny. However, after these negotiations, the Orlando Magic is no longer the basketball team you see on the court. The Magic are recruiting choices and flexibility of salary cap and ACL and hope rehabs.

Younger Orlando Magic fans, if any, may not have been there before. A Orlando Magic settlement veteran like me and many others who lived, died and rebuilt with Magic since the early 1990s, we’ve seen this movie twice before. First, during the summer of 1999, when the final pieces of the Shaq and Penny era were exchanged for cents on the dollar (we didn’t know at the time, but it would become the beloved Magic team “Heart and Hustle”), and again during the summer of 2012 , when Dwightmare reached its merciful conclusion (we didn’t know that at the time, but a mere launch would go on to become an All-Star twice and the franchise leader in field goals did). These situations were a little different because it was the official closing of the window for the opposing ex-teams.

This current Magic team is rebuilding a rebuild, with just one winning season and two playoff appearances.

Chris Elise photo / Getty Images

Once the reset button is pressed, it brings up a second guess, empty and a strange mixture of sentimentality and anger. To be incredibly dramatic for a moment, it is the sporting equivalent of coming home and discovering that your spouse has been stolen, leaving you in an empty house to pick up the pieces and reflect on the future.

The future, for a team like Magic, is constantly uncertain. It has been that way since Dwight Howard left, at least for the next few years, perhaps more than ever, with the team pinning their hopes on the lottery balls and the healthy returns of Markelle Fultz and Jonathan Isaac.

But at least there is hope.

This was something that was missing while Vucevic was in Orlando. As good as it has been in recent years, there has never been a feeling of legitimate hope for the future of Magic while he was on the team. There was never a realistic chance that your ceiling would be higher than in the first round of the playoffs. It wasn’t his fault. He was a victim of circumstances and years of poor decision making. The same to a lesser extent for Gordon and Fournier.

Jennifer Pottheiser / NBAE photo via Getty Images

Sometimes the only way to regain a sense of hope is to drop everything and build from scratch, something that Magic should have done years ago, instead of putting an unnecessary importance on ending your post-season drought to join a pair first -round series. When a team does that, the payoff doesn’t look great on paper and can be even worse on the court.

It is an ugly road ahead. The negotiations made on Thursday were concluded to make this year’s team much worse, and they won’t exactly make next year’s team much better. Unless this group is the second coming of the Magic “Heart and Hustle”, we probably won’t see competitive basketball in Orlando until, at best, the 2022-2023 season. The hope is that, until then, the best scenario will materialize.

That means waiting for a pick from the top three in the 2021 lottery (praying).

It means hoping that the Bulls will somehow miss the playoffs (sorry, Vooch!) And end up with the fifth choice in the 2021 draft (long shot, most likely a mid-round choice).

It means waiting for the Magic front office to make the right decision with those draft choices and others acquired on Thursday (considering its history).

It means hoping that at least one of your trio of guards – Markelle Fultz, Cole Anthony, RJ Hampton – will become the All-Star caliber (possible).

It means waiting for Jonathan Isaac to come back and become the best defender in the league (likely).

This means hoping that Wendell Carter Jr. or Mo Bamba – two low-performing centers, but still brutes chosen one after the other in the 2018 draft – will emerge as a legitimate starting five (safe to say that we won’t see a production like Vooch’s). central position soon, but that shouldn’t be the expectation).

It means hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.

Because Magic did not trade all of their initial line-up for Gary Harris and RJ Hampton and Otto Porter Jr. and Wendell Carter Jr. and Jeff Teague and first and second round choices and a $ 17 million traded player exception.

They traded them for hope.