The Orlando Magic had an unfortunate leak occur on Monday when Patricio Garino’s agent tweeted out a photo of his client inking a deal with the squad. This happens all the time, but in this scenario, Garino was sitting at a table in front of a whiteboard that contained a list of players that the Magic were thinking about targeting this offseason.
That board had columns for trade and free agent possibilities for this summer. While the top of free agent target list isn’t especially damaging to have leaked — every team with max cap space will likely pursue Paul Millsap — the trade scenarios could be, most notably the one that seems to float the idea of swapping Aaron Gordon for Dario Saric.
This kind of thing happens in most organizations, where somewhere there is a list of players they want to go after as they prepare plans for the offseason, but it’s not something you want leaked. Magic general manager Rob Hennigan did his best at damage control on Tuesday when he was contacted by the Orlando Sentinel‘s Josh Robbins for a comment on the leaked whiteboard list.
Hennigan told Robbins that the list of players, sorted into free agent and trade columns, was “’not indicative of plans’ and [they] were ‘simply listing options, including some of which other teams have inquired about.’”
I mean, that’s true in the sense that they’re still in the deciding phase of looking at their options, which means we don’t (and they don’t) know what their plans are at this moment. However, this also is a pretty comprehensive list of names and there seems to be, at least in the free agency column, an order to the list with regards to priority for targets.
This is a solid effort at damage control from Hennigan, but really there isn’t much damage done by this list aside from having to have a conversation with Aaron Gordon and his agent about some things. It tips the hand that the Magic see positional versatility and stretch bigs as a priority this offseason, but otherwise, the list of names is pretty standard. The biggest change we’ll see from the Magic this offseason will probably be to start signing free agents (maybe some from that list!) in a new place that isn’t in front of a giant whiteboard with possible plans on them.
