Granted, it's not necessarily anything new — I mean, we've seen it before — but man, Victor Oladipo's on-the-break 360-degree dunk is still a very cool dunk:
It's especially cool when it comes in the final minute of the fourth quarter, off a lead-pass assist that followed a knifing-through-traffic steal from your starting-to-put-it-together rookie backcourt partner, to put both the finishing touches on a second consecutive big-time performance and a very bold exclamation point on an impressive home win over against a Western Conference playoff team. Cool stuff all the way around, if you ask me.
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The helicopter hammer not only brought the Amway Center faithful to their feet; it also gave the second-year man out of Indiana his second straight 30-point performance, marking the first time in his young career that he's eclipsed that mark in consecutive games. Perhaps most importantly, it also all but extinguished (if not practically, then at least spiritually) the Houston Rockets' hopes of coming back to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at the hands of Oladipo's Orlando Magic. A Patrick Beverley layup on the ensuing possession would cut the Magic's lead to five, but James Harden's attempt at a deficit-carving 3-pointer went wanting and Jacque Vaughn's club made its free throws down the stretch, putting the finishing touches on a 120-113 win that gave the Magic back-to-back wins for the first time in 2015.
Oladipo finished with a game-high 32 points on 12-for-19 shooting, going 3-for-4 from 3-point land and 5-for-6 from the foul line, to go with six rebounds, six assists, three steals and three turnovers in 38-plus minutes of work. The offensive explosion comes on the heels of his 33-point outing in Orlando's Monday win over the Chicago Bulls, which you probably remember more clearly for Nikola Vucevic's screwface-inducing posterization of Pau Gasol. (Vucevic did his fair share of damage on Wednesday, too, chipping in 25 points on 10-for-17 shooting, snaring 12 rebounds, dishing three assists and snagging three steals in 37 minutes to outduel the man for whom he was traded a couple of years back, former Magic All-Star Dwight Howard.)
After missing the first nine games of the season recovering from a sprained medial collateral ligament in his right knee, Oladipo struggled at times to find his rhythm and touch over his first two weeks back. He's looked awfully good since, though, averaging 17.3 points, 4.2 assists, 3.4 rebounds and 1.8 steals in 34.6 minutes per game since Dec. 1, shooting 48.5 percent from the floor, 43.5 percent from 3-point range and 79.4 percent from the foul line. He's been aggressive, explosive and often opportunistic, as he was in back-cutting behind Beverley for this big-time slam to put Orlando up 100-98 late in the fourth quarter:
The guy who set Oladipo up on those two dunks has been pretty important of late, too.
Elfrid Payton, the second of the Magic's 2014 first-round picks (along with the injured Aaron Gordon), chipped in 15 points (including 12 in the fourth quarter) along with six rebounds, four assists and two steals in the win. The rookie out of Louisiana-Lafayette still has a long way to go when it comes to shooting the basketball, but he's stepped up his facilitating of late — his assist-to-turnover ratio has improved from just over 2-to-1 over the first two months of the season to nearly 3-to-1 over his last 11 contests — and the typically moribund Magic offense seems to have a bit more juice when Oladipo and Payton are paired in the backcourt.
The Magic as a whole average 95.43 possessions per 48 minutes, according to NBA.com's stat tool, which ranks 22nd among the 30 NBA teams in pace of play. When Oladipo and Payton share the floor, that rises to 97.6 possessions-per-48, which would be the eighth-fastest pace in the league over the course of the full season. And while the backcourt-of-the-future isn't exactly a dominant offensive force of the present — Orlando has averaged 101.3 points per 100 possessions in their 499 shared minutes, equivalent to the Boston Celtics' No. 20 full-season mark — that's still quite a bit better than what the Magic have managed on the whole while clanging their way to a tie with the Charlotte Hornets for the league's fourth-worst offense (99.2 points-per-100).
Things appear to be trending upward in those regards, too. Over the last dozen games, Orlando's averaging 103.8-per-100 in Oladipo-Payton minutes, a solid and just-above-league-average mark that would rank just below the John Wall-led Washington Wizards in offensive efficiency, while getting up and down to the tune of 98.6 possessions-per-48, which would place below the five fastest offenses in the league this season. While the Magic still lack enough shot-creation, shot-making and floor-spacing to become a truly legit offense, they might have settled on the sort of offensive identity that many young and athletic teams tend to favor, and Oladipo seems happy with it.
"We just figured it out, man," Oladipo said in an on-court post-game interview, flashing a big grin as he was asked about the Magic's recent penchant for pace-pushing. "It took time, but we figured out what we need to do in order to win. We figured out that we've got to play fast and we've got to play at a high tempo no matter what happens, and we've got to stick together. We've got to just continue to keep working."
Whether that work will eventually pay the sort of dividends that turns Vaughn's club from "object of intrigue among NBA insiders" into "frisky young team that can sneak into the playoffs and make some noise" remains to be seen. For the moment, though, after back-to-back wins over playoff teams in which its young studs turned in both strong play and scintillating highlights, Orlando fans should take a moment to celebrate their often unexciting squad seeming to locate at least a little bit of actual on-court magic.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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