Nor is it not easy to be the number 1 of the Draft selected by the Orlando Magic. Not because it is a franchise with a history of victories and demands, but because of the recent past, which marks you as the heir. When Paolo Banchero managed to stage the big surprise by overtaking the theoretical favorite Jabari Smith in the selectionthe spotlight went to the boy from Duke, but they remembered all the successes that two legends of the NBA reported to them: Shaquille O’Neal and Dwight Howard.
And Paolo Banchero looks at ‘Shaq’ and ‘Superman’ to see two players who catapulted the Florida franchise to success. Together with the ’32’ they reached the final of the year 1995 being a team born in 1989. That gigantic pvot from LSU Change your rules of the game. Until he left the ship for Los Angeles and managed to be hysterical by reaching three rings as a couple with Kobe Bryant. “I regret that decision,” ‘Shaq’ came to say more than two decades after his election.
This is how Paolo Banchero plays, number 1 in the 2022 NBA draft
The Florida franchise would return to those heights nearly a decade and a half later. Run 2009 and the Eastern Conference was dominated by the fearsome pvot Dwight Howard. He was ‘the heir’, because he also dominated through his athletic conditions and marked that they were an elite team. Names like Nelson, Afflalo or Turkoglou taking giant steps because the jumps of the ’12’ were indefensible.
As happened with ‘Shaq’, the finals were his ceiling. There, the Lakers returned to the ring, and, incidentally, Pau Gasol made history. Howard, like O’Neal, headed for California a short time later. He would never succeed, although it was in his second stage when he achieved the champion’s ring in the bubble of… Orlando, precisely.
Banchero, number 1 in the 2022 NBA Draft: “I’ll never forget it”
With these two precedents, Paolo Banchero has a challenge ahead of him of an exaggerated size. And if at some point he were attracted to gold and purple… He would also fulfill a curious challenge that Shaquille O’Neal and Dwight Howard performed. Historic and demanding escorts in search of something giant.
