The Orlando Magic roster in 2009 was composed of a talented group of players led by head coach Stan Van Gundy. At that time, the team was considered one of the top contenders in the Eastern Conference. One of the key players on the roster was center Dwight Howard. Known for his dominant presence in the paint, Howard was a force to be reckoned with on both ends of the court. His shot-blocking ability and rebounding prowess made him one of the top centers in the league. The Magic also had a strong backcourt led by Jameer Nelson and Courtney Lee.

2009 orlando magic roster

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2009-10 Orlando Magic Roster

National Basketball Association (NBA)
Team Record: 59-23
Finishing 1st in the NBA's Southeast Division of the Eastern Conference
Postseason: 10-4 Lost conference finals
Conference First Round - Defeated Charlotte Bobcats 4-0
Conference Semifinals - Defeated Atlanta Hawks 4-0
Conference Finals - Lost to Boston Celtics 4-2
Coach: Stan Van Gundy (59-23)
Location: Orlando, Florida
Attendance: 715,901, Avg. 17,461 in 41 home dates

The Orlando Magic of the National Basketball Association ended the 2009-10 season with a record of 59 wins and 23 losses, finishing first in the NBA's Southeast Division of the Eastern Conference. The team compiled a postseason mark of 10-4.

Orlando racked up 8,426 points and allowed 7,812. Dwight Howard netted a team-leading 1,503 points for the Magic, while Vince Carter scored 16 or more per game, too. Dwight Howard contributed 1,082 rebounds. Jameer Nelson dished out 353 assists for the squad.

On defense, Rashard Lewis added 78 steals, and Dwight Howard blocked 228 shots.

Stan Van Gundy coached the team. The 2009-10 Orlando Magic lost in the conference finals.

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Forgotten innovators: The 2008-09 Orlando Magic accelerated the NBA’s shift to the 3-pointer

Editor’s note: The NBA added the 3-point shot 40 seasons ago. Here’s one in a series of stories that will appear this week on The Athletic on how the shot has impacted various players and teams across the league.

ORLANDO, Fla. — On Jan. 13, 2009, the Orlando Magic accomplished something no NBA team had ever done in the three-decade history of the league’s 3-point shot.

The Magic sank 23 3-pointers that night, setting a record for 3s made in a game.

Almost every non-center on the active roster added to the deluge. Starters Jameer Nelson, Courtney Lee, Hedo Turkoglu and Rashard Lewis and reserves Keith Bogans, Brian Cook, Anthony Johnson, J.J. Redick and Jeremy Richardson made at least one trey apiece.

“Never seen anything like that,” Lewis told reporters after the game, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “When the ball is falling in like that, it’s unbelievable. It’s a lot of fun.”

With the 3-point shot and All-NBA center Dwight Howard powering the offense, Orlando kept having fun. The Magic launched an almost unheard-of 2,147 treys that regular season, won 59 games and defeated the defending champion Boston Celtics and the LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers in the playoffs to reach the NBA Finals.

The 2008-09 Magic lost in the finals, but despite that defeat, they rank as one of the most innovative teams in recent league history because of the way they played, how coach Stan Van Gundy deployed players and how GM Otis Smith built the roster. These days, basketball coaches, executives and fans consider the 3-point shot and stretch power forwards as necessary components to successful teams. But 11 seasons ago, heavy reliance on long-range shooting still was gaining acceptance. That Magic team helped transform conventional wisdom because it proved, for the first time, that a team could rely on the 3-pointer heavily, downsize its lineup for a full 48 minutes and win a conference title at the same time.

“A lot of teams are playing small ball and spread the floor, a lot of big men in pick-and-roll, pop-and-shoot,” Lewis says now. “We were one of the trendsetters of it.”

Other teams had pushed boundaries with the 3-point shot before and had been successful. The 1994-95 Houston Rockets, coached by Rudy Tomjanovich, won the NBA title after they launched a then-record 21.4 treys per game during the regular season. The 2005-06 Phoenix Suns, coached by Mike D’Antoni, hoisted 25.6 3s per game in the regular season but lost in the Western Conference finals.

But the 2008-09 Magic took 3-point shooting and small-ball lineups to unprecedented extremes for a conference champion. Orlando attempted 26.2 3s per game in the regular season, the fourth-highest per-game average in league history to that point; no prior conference champ ever exceeded 21.4 attempts per game, according to Basketball Reference. Orlando launched 23.3 treys during the playoffs; no prior conference champ had ever attempted more than 22.0 3s per game in the postseason.

“What changed was playing a full game, or most of the game anyway, right from the start with what you would call a shooting four,” Van Gundy says now. “So we were putting four 3-point shooters on the floor for the entire game right from the beginning. I think that’s where we were a little bit different maybe than what teams had done up to that point.”

When the team hired Van Gundy in June 2007, he inherited a team that had attempted only 11.7 3s per game the prior season, ranking 28th in the league in attempts. There were valid reasons for that relatively low figure. Howard, though an All-Star, had not yet become a dominant force. The team also started a traditional big man at power forward, 6-foot-11, 230-pound Tony Battie.

During the offseason, however, Smith brought aboard Rashard Lewis, a former All-Star small forward with the Seattle SuperSonics, in a sign-and-trade deal. Lewis agreed to join the Magic on a six-year deal worth $118 million on one condition: that he would continue to play small forward.

As training camp approached, Van Gundy expected to start Battie, a 10-year veteran and a leader in the locker room, at power forward. But Van Gundy also intended to give his players freedom to shoot 3s because Howard would command attention on the interior and because Smith, the general manager, had built a roster of capable outside shooters who complemented Howard’s strengths.

Van Gundy’s decision to downsize and play small ball occurred, as many innovations do, out of a mixture of necessity and smart thinking. In mid-September, Battie tore the rotator cuff in his left shoulder during a pickup game. The injury, and subsequent surgery, would keep Battie out for the entire season.

Suddenly, before Van Gundy had even coached a game with his new team, the Magic faced a crisis.

He devised a potential solution: To maximize his best players’ minutes, he wanted to start Lewis at power forward and play Turkoglu at small forward. In theory, at least, the Magic would field a starting lineup in which four capable 3-point shooters would surround Howard: Nelson at point guard, Bogans at shooting guard and Turkoglu and Lewis at the forward spots.

It would become known as a “four-out, one-in” approach. Howard would post up on the interior or roll to the hoop on pick-and-rolls, and he had ample space to maneuver because the Magic would array four capable outside shooters on the perimeter.

Defenses had to pick their poison, all of it lethal. If they double-teamed Howard, he could hurl the ball to a dangerous 3-point shooter. And if they crowded the Magic’s 3-point shooters, Orlando typically enjoyed a mismatch on the interior.

Van Gundy insists no brilliance was involved.

“If Tony Battie had never gotten hurt, we would have been like everybody else at the time and been playing a stretch four for only parts of the game and when we got behind late,” Van Gundy says.

“If you look back at our roster, there really wasn’t another choice that would have made any sense. We didn’t have a starting-caliber true power forward to put at that spot. There was nothing else that made sense. I’m not trying to be humble or self-deprecating or anything else. There was no genius to this at all. We liked the 3-point shot anyway, and we were going to space around it. And now we just added one more shooter, and it was all out of necessity.”

Stretch fours were not new in the NBA, as other pieces have detailed, but they were not plentiful, either.

Six-foot-10 Matt Bullard, a highly accurate 3-point shooter, spaced the floor for the Rockets during most of the 1990s, but he typically came off the bench and never averaged more than 19.0 minutes a game. Six-foot-10 Cliff Robinson started to launch 3s during his sixth NBA season, and he made a substantial impact for the Portland Trail Blazers and Suns, though he often played small forward. Dirk Nowitzki, who led the 2005-06 Dallas Mavericks to the Western Conference title, arguably ranks as the most influential stretch four in league history.

In the Magic’s case, one problem remained for Van Gundy’s improvised plan: Would Lewis agree to the move? At 6-foot-10, he had the height to play power forward. But he was lanky, and he would have to guard more physical, traditional power forwards such as Kevin Garnett and Zach Randolph. Plus, when Lewis agreed to join Orlando, it was on the condition he would play small forward.

Van Gundy decided to meet with Lewis one-on-one to ask him to change positions.

Steve Clifford, one of Van Gundy’s assistant coaches and now the Magic’s current head coach, remembers that day well.

“We’re all kind of waiting and nobody had any idea what he’d say,” Clifford says.

By all accounts, the meeting between Lewis and Van Gundy lasted fewer than five minutes, all because of Lewis. He agreed to the move without complaint.

“I’m the type of player that played to win games,” Lewis says.

“Stan told me he wanted to move me to the four position. I was all for it because he pretty much told me he wants Dwight to control the paint and we’re going to put shooters around him, and he wanted to keep Hedo Turkoglu on the floor. I felt like that was our best chance of competing in the Eastern Conference to try to win a championship. When he told me that, it was like a no-brainer for me.”

On Oct. 31, 2007, in Van Gundy’s first regular-season game as Orlando’s coach, the Magic went 12 for 22 from beyond the arc and routed the Milwaukee Bucks, 102-83. Lewis scored a game-high 26 points, while Turkoglu added 24. Howard dominated on the inside, with a 16-point, 12-rebound, 7-block performance.

The 2007-08 Magic never stopped shooting the 3. They made 801 treys during the regular season, the second-highest total in NBA history through that season, trailing only the 2005-06 Suns.

Critics, most of them in the media, often uttered the phrase “live by the 3, die by the 3” when Orlando lost games. The implication was clear: An NBA team could not win a title by being so heavily reliant on the 3-point shot.

But when the season ended, the Magic had not only made those 801 treys,but also had attempted 2,074 3s, the fourth-highest total in league history at that time.

Orlando won 52 games and reached the playoffs’ second round, where it lost to the far more experienced Detroit Pistons.

The downsized lineup and heavy use of the 3-point shot worked so well that Van Gundy kept the same scheme for the 2008-09 season, even after Battie had healed.

Smith, meanwhile, continued to add capable long-range shooters to the roster. During the summer of 2008, he drafted shooting guard Courtney Lee and signed swingman Mickael Pietrus to add depth beside Bogans, Turkoglu and Redick. And when Nelson suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in early February, Smith shored up the point guard spot by completing a midseason trade for Rafer Alston.

Seven Magic players sank at least 50 treys in 2008-09: Johnson, Redick, Nelson, Lee, Pietrus, Turkoglu and Lewis.

Howard averaged 20.6 points per game and earned his second consecutive first-team All-NBA nod.

“Because we had that big guy in the middle that took up a lot of space, the thing that gave him more space was shooting,” Smith says. “It would dictate how people were going to play him. At the end of the day, you could not pull in so far to pick up a roll guy because you were concerned about Pietrus in the corner or you were concerned about J.J. on the wing. So he gave us a different way to play. So we went about our business, just trying to put shooting around him to give him opportunities to work inside.”

The Magic finished the 2008-09 season with the third-highest number of 3-point makes in league history (817), trailing only the 2005-06 Suns and the 2008-09 New York Knicks. The Magic ended the season with the fourth-highest total of 3-point attempts (2,147), trailing the 2008-09 Knicks, 2007-08 Golden State Warriors and 2002-03 Celtics.

Orlando won 59 games.

The Magic didn’t change their style of play in the postseason, either. They launched 23.3 treys a game, the ninth-highest playoff average in league history to that point. They became the only team in the top 21 in postseason 3-point tries per game to reach the NBA Finals.

They defeated the defending world champion Celtics in the Eastern Conference semifinals in seven games.

In Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, Lewis drained a 3-pointer to put Orlando ahead 107-106 with 14.7 seconds to play in regulation. Turkoglu provided the assist. The plan that Van Gundy had solidified when Battie had gotten hurt nearly 20 months earlier had worked perfectly in a high-pressure situation.

But the Magic faced several disadvantages when they faced the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals. The Lakers had more experience because they had played in the 2008 finals, losing to the Celtics in six games. The Lakers also had a dominant, experienced superstar on the wing, Kobe Bryant. And the Magic planned to bring back Nelson, who was rusty because he had not played in a game since he had injured his shoulder.

In Game 1, the Magic felt overwhelmed by the spotlight and lost in a rout, 100-75. In Game 2, the Magic had a chance to win the game outright when, with the score tied 88-88 and his team about to inbound the ball with 0.6 seconds remaining in regulation, Van Gundy called for Turkoglu to throw a long lob toward the hoop; Lee collected Turkoglu’s pass but missed a difficult layup. Los Angeles won in overtime, 101-96.

When the series shifted to Orlando, the Magic won Game 3, 108-104. In Game 4, the Magic held a lead late in the fourth quarter, but the Lakers’ Derek Fisher hit a game-tying 3 with 4.6 seconds left. The Lakers won the game in overtime, 99-91, and finished off the series with a comfortable victory in Game 5. Bryant had dominated the series, averaging 32.4 points and 7.4 assists per game.

In the series, the Magic made just 33.0 percent of their 3-point tries, seemingly giving credence to the notion that a team that relied on the 3 so heavily during the regular season, averaging 26.2 attempts per game, could not win an NBA title.

Six years later, the 2014-15 Warriors shattered that thinking. Led by Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, Golden State averaged 27.0 attempts from beyond the arc during the regular season, sank a league-high 39.8 percent of them, and won the title over LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers in six games.

Now, the 1994-95 Rockets, mid-2000s Suns and 2010s Warriors receive the bulk of the credit for popularizing the 3-pointer.

The 2008-09 Magic are the forgotten innovators. They pushed the accepted boundaries of their time and bridged the path between the 1994-95 Rockets and the 2014-15 Warriors.

Just how ahead of its time was that Magic team? Its NBA record for making 23 3-pointers in single game, set on Jan. 13, 2009, remained unbroken until Dec. 16, 2016, when the Rockets made 24.

“Obviously, Stan is one of the great coaches of our time, but I still don’t think that he gets the credit he deserves for being a pioneer,” Clifford says. “Stan has so many strengths, but one of the things he’s really good at is he can look at a group on the floor and say, ‘They need to play this way.’ His vision of how he wanted our team to play was so definitive.”

(Top photo of Dwight Howard, Hedo Turkoglu, Rashard Lewis, Keith Bogans and Jameer Nelson / Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images)

Forty Seasons of 3s

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The Magic also had a strong backcourt led by Jameer Nelson and Courtney Lee. Nelson, the starting point guard, was known for his playmaking ability and three-point shooting. Lee, on the other hand, provided a solid shooting guard presence and was a reliable scorer.

Additionally, the Magic had a number of other key contributors on their roster. Rashard Lewis, a versatile forward, provided a scoring punch on the perimeter. Hedo Turkoglu, an experienced veteran, added playmaking and shooting from the small forward position. And Ryan Anderson, a young power forward, provided valuable scoring off the bench. With this talented roster, the Magic had a successful season in 2009. They finished with a record of 59 wins and 23 losses, securing the second seed in the Eastern Conference. In the playoffs, they went on a deep run, eventually reaching the NBA Finals where they faced off against the Los Angeles Lakers. Unfortunately, the Magic fell short in the Finals, losing to the Lakers in five games. Despite this disappointment, the 2009 Orlando Magic roster remains one of the most memorable in franchise history..

Reviews for "Analyzing the statistical performance of the 2009 Orlando Magic roster"

1. John - 2 stars

I was not a fan of the 2009 Orlando Magic roster. While they had some talented players like Dwight Howard and Jameer Nelson, I felt that their supporting cast was lacking. The team heavily relied on Howard's dominance in the paint, but they lacked consistent outside shooting and playmaking. Additionally, I found their style of play to be boring and predictable. Overall, I was disappointed with their performance during that season.

2. Sarah - 1 star

In my opinion, the 2009 Orlando Magic roster was a one-man team. Dwight Howard was the only player who consistently stood out and made a significant impact. The rest of the roster seemed mediocre at best. Their lack of depth and reliable scoring options was evident, especially during the playoffs. I found their style of play to be too reliant on Howard's athleticism, and it often felt like they had no plan B. Overall, I was not impressed with their roster construction and the team's performance during that season.

3. Mike - 2 stars

While the 2009 Orlando Magic roster had its moments, I ultimately felt that they were overrated. Dwight Howard was undoubtedly a dominant force in the paint, but their supporting cast failed to consistently step up. Their lack of offensive creativity and reliance on shooting three-pointers became their downfall during crucial moments. Despite making it to the NBA Finals, they were ultimately outplayed and outmatched by a more well-rounded team. Overall, I was underwhelmed by the roster's performance and felt like they could have done better with better team chemistry and complementary pieces.

4. Emily - 2.5 stars

The 2009 Orlando Magic roster had some good players, but their lack of depth hindered their chances of truly succeeding. Dwight Howard was a force to be reckoned with, but their lack of a reliable second option was evident. Their shooting was streaky at best, and they often struggled to score consistently. While they had moments of brilliance, their overall performance was average at best. I believe that with a stronger supporting cast, they could have achieved more success during that season.

The chemistry and camaraderie of the 2009 Orlando Magic roster