As reported in this piece at Uproxx, the NBA franchise/meth lab fire Orlando Magic may have had their offseason plans accidentally leaked from a Twitter picture. A photo of rookie Patricio Garino signing his contract was taken in front of a whiteboard with a list of players from other teams on it, in columns labeled "Hybrid Trade" and "Hybrid Free Agency," among other things. While it's not entirely clear whether the names are listed in any specific order, or what Orlando would be willing to give up for any of them (aside from a single parenthetical that suggests they might consider trading Aaron Gordon for Sixers wing Dario Saric), it looks like the Magic will be taking a good long look at a few players currently on the Nuggets:
A magnified version of Orlando's whiteboard
As you can see, assuming that "Beasley" refers to Michael rather than Malik (which makes the most sense for a variety of reasons), there are three current Nuggets on the board: It appears the Magic are looking to trade for Wilson Chandler and Juancho Hernangomez, and may make a play for Danilo Gallinari, assuming (probably correctly) that he will decline to exercise his player option for 2017-2018. Most interesting to Nuggets fans is the fact that all three Nuggets are at the top of their respective sections.
Again, we don't have any idea what the ordering of this list means--it could be a brainstorming list where people just wrote down names as they thought of them, it could be a ranking of how much they want each player--but if it is either of those, it would seem to suggest that Orlando is taking a close look at the Nuggets' assets, and might be willing to give up quite a lot in order to get them. Or maybe they just noticed the outcome of the Plumlee-Nurkic trade, and have decided that Tim Connelly might be the one guy in the league that Rob Hennigan could outsmart.
The Nuggets players the Magic seem most interested in are all wing players who can stretch the floor and defend multiple positions, which makes sense: the Magic entered the season with a logjam in the frontcourt and had to play Aaron Gordon out of position for most of the year. The Serge Ibaka trade gave them a little more flexibility, but they still have Bismack Biyombo and Nikola Vucevic competing with Gordon for frontcourt minutes, and they're likely looking to move some of those assets. The only problem is that Denver has no need for another elite center, and we've already got a starting power forward who can't shoot.
Unless Orlando is willing to part with a draft pick or give up a prospect like Gordon for pennies on the dollar, potential trades between the teams are difficult to think of. So the Nuggets go into the offseason basically knowing that they're going to have to make Gallinari a good offer or let him go, which they probably already could have guessed.
