Orlando poised to make 'quantum leap' in the East

Man in the middle: Dwight Howard and the Magic are rolling early in the season despite a road-heavy schedule. John Biever/SI

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Since Shaquille O'Neal departed for Los Angeles after the 1995-96 season, the Orlando Magic have generated about as much excitement as the "Road to Tomorrow" at Epcot Center. (I've not been but a dozen people tell me it's boring.) The franchise has made myriad personnel, coaching and front-office changes but none of it has resulted in much magic and, in six playoff appearances, nary an advance beyond the first round.

At this early checkpoint, however, the Magic are the talk of the league, at least that part of the league that is talked out about the Knicks and chooses to wait for the Celtics' schedule to get a little tougher before evaluating Boston's quick start. My SI.com colleague Marty Burns has Orlando ranked fifth in his latest Power Rankings, and I think that's about right; I certainly wouldn't go lower than that. Going into Friday night's home game against Indiana, the Magic stand 16-4 despite spending 32 of their first 51 days on the road, including a bone-wearying preseason trip to China, the kind of excursion that veteran teams would be using as an alibi all the way through to 2008. (Orlando is 11-2 on the road in the regular season.)

As modest as the Magic's publicly stated goal might be -- to get back to the playoffs -- they no doubt have loftier aims, situated as they are in the Eastern Conference where the Celtics are the only other team that seems to have gotten markedly better. (Though I saw the Detroit Pistons on Wednesday night in Charlotte and they look really, really good.) If Orlando succeeds in, say, making the conference finals or getting all the way to the NBA Finals, it will be doing something very rare indeed in this league. Which is: making a quantum leap, hereafter known as a QL.

A QL is impossible to precisely quantify, but I'm establishing that one of two criterion has to be present. A team must:

1. Be coming off a poor season to make some noise (a little noise anyway) in the postseason the following year.

2. Rise from the bottom or middle of the conference to the top in one season. That is what the Magic, the eighth-ranked team in the East last season at 40-42, must do to accomplish a QL.

A non-playoff team, even one that showed vast improvement, cannot be a QL team, not in a league with as, uh, democratic a playoff system as the NBA has.

Starting with the '89-90 season, the year the NBA went to 27 teams with the acceptance of Orlando and Minnesota (Miami and Charlotte had joined the previous season), here are the top QLs in chronological order:

• The 1991-92 Cleveland Cavaliers. Won 57 games after finishing 33-49 in previous season. Lost in the conference finals to Michael Jordan's Bulls.

• The 1992-93 Charlotte Hornets. Won 44 games after finishing 31-51 in previous season. Beat Boston in the first round before losing to the Knicks.

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