You’d think after experiencing live and firsthand the past six seasons of LeBron James—an altruistic basketball savant who periodically transforms into the broadest of hammers to get the job done—that the Lakers announcers would have known exactly what to make of Franz Wagner on Thursday night.
Yet, in the midst of a career game, as Wagner did everything to keep his Orlando Magic within striking distance on the road, play-by-play announcer Bill Macdonald and longtime Lakers analyst Stu Lantz could only scoff at how much he was dribbling—how the offense seemed all about him, how that couldn’t work long-term. Never mind that each of Wagner’s slithering drives led to paint touches worth their weight in gold, or how lethal he’d been on pull-up jumpers. Never mind the fact that Wagner is playing the best stretch of basketball in his life in the absence of Magic star Paolo Banchero, managing to be one of the most impactful two-way players in the entire league for a Magic squad that has won seven of its past eight games. Expectations shape reality. Macdonald and Lantz had yet to catch on to what was before them: a young star, willing and able to duel with the Lakers’ far more recognizable faces. They just didn’t see Wagner in that light.
And then, a full eclipse. An audacious 26-foot stepback 3-pointer with three seconds remaining in the game. Real seize-the-moment, alpha-type stuff. No hesitation, no fear. Just the right player at the right time, in precisely the place he’s meant to be. In total, Wagner finished with 37 points on 50-40-87.5 splits, six rebounds, 11 assists, and four steals in a 119-118 Magic victory on the road. Wagner, 23, is the youngest forward to record a 35-point, 10-assist game since … LeBron. Of course.
“He is a young man that wants to do all of the right things—by the game of basketball, by his work ethic, by his professionalism, by the teammate that he is.” Magic coach Jamahl Mosley said after the game. “So sometimes, taking tough shots is not always a thing that he wants to do. He just wants to make the right play. But sometimes those tough shots are exactly what this team needs. And we saw that tonight.”
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Maybe this is just who Wagner is now. Maybe it’s who he’s always hoped to become. He’s always been the consummate complementary player—hell, he averaged exactly 9.3 shot attempts per game in both of his seasons at Michigan. Very little about his game screamed star back then, but upon his arrival in the NBA, it became increasingly difficult to find many glaring flaws. That alone gave him an outside shot at something greater. Maybe history will point to 2023 as the breakthrough, when he played at the FIBA World Cup, where he served as Germany’s best player (with apologies to Dennis Schroder) en route to the country’s first international gold medal in basketball. He was fiery, assertive, the leading man on a team of veterans. He had just turned 22 years old. He carried that mantle into the Paris Olympics this past summer, scoring more points than anyone in the tournament outside of Nikola Jokic. It’s become increasingly likely that this Franz Wagner isn’t some phenomenal aberration, but a version of himself that has lain dormant. Maybe this is who he’s always been.
One gets a sense that Wagner has been methodically preparing for this breakthrough for the past five years. He was a 17-year-old rising star in the Bundesliga for his hometown squad, Alba Berlin, before committing to Michigan in the summer of 2019. It was a calculated decision, one that he hoped would broaden the scope of his ambition. “The American mentality on how to play basketball, merging with the way that we learned basketball [in Europe], can be a really good combination,” Wagner said on the Long Shot podcast. “That killer mentality or that competitiveness that people want to show to you on the court, if I can really embody that and learn that in a college setting—I can’t do that in Europe. Learning [from] college can sometimes prepare you even better when you’re playing 30-35 minutes per game there and get to take on a lot of responsibility.”
Wagner has prided himself on his malleability since entering the league in 2021. Players of his size, 6-foot-10, who can create off the dribble and play lockdown defense on the wings are exceedingly rare, and Wagner was more than capable of filling the gaps in Orlando. (The late Chuck Daly would have loved him.) In the past two seasons, Wagner has been the ultimate complementary force alongside Banchero, an incendiary offensive talent who seemed to be taking a monumental year three leap before suffering a torn right oblique the night before Halloween. In an instant, the gaps suddenly became a much larger void. Wagner has risen to the challenge in ways no one could have foreseen. This month, he’s averaging 25.4 points, 6.2 rebounds, 6.3 assists (on only 2.2 turnovers), and 1.8 steals per game as the Magic’s primary option. Since the start of November, he leads the team in total points, 3-pointers made, assists, and steals and is second in rebounds. He has a higher usage rate over the season than Jalen Brunson or James Harden. In an instant, Wagner has transformed himself into an All-NBA-caliber player—and arguably the most versatile rising star in the league.
There is a slipstream effect at play here. Wagner has assumed a lot of the responsibilities that Banchero had in the offense. The Magic are running a lot of ball screens for Franz as a handler, putting him in situations where he can operate by running downhill on drives. He can make plays out of the short roll. Switch a smaller defender onto him, and he can sink his defender down into the post, using his footwork and access to angles to either score or find an unencumbered teammate. But the degree to which he’s been able to scale up all of his responsibilities has been nothing short of miraculous.
There aren’t many players across NBA history who have been able to step into an alpha and omega role and put up star numbers without sacrificing efficiency on offense or effort and consistency on defense. There is one who comes to mind, though: Scottie Pippen. Is that sacrilegious?
Our boss once called Pippen “an exceptional athlete who redefined a position, a guy who allowed MJ to be MJ, a guy with enough rings for two hands. There has been no one like him before or since.” What Pippen did during Michael Jordan’s first retirement in 1993-94 shouldn’t have been possible, and all it took was the greatest player of all time to take a sabbatical. All those categories Wagner currently leads the Magic in? Pippen did that for an entire season, all while ramping up his effort as the most imposing perimeter defensive playmaker of his (or any) era. Pippen’s frame, coordination, and mind-boggling, explosive athletic traits made every possession absolute hell for opposing teams.
While Wagner may not possess all of Pippen’s natural tools, he has found ways to similarly impact the game on defense as an event creator. There are few players better at almost imperceptibly sliding over as the help defender and dislodging a ball from just outside an opponent’s peripheral vision—especially given that we’re talking about someone who’s 6-foot-10. His arms are constantly jutting out when he’s defending on the ball, like antennae on an arthropod—a means of sensing his opponent’s orientation and micro-movements while asserting his own presence. Players of his size and lateral flexibility don’t come around often, especially ones who have a true understanding of how to change games defensively. Wagner can and does defend all across the positional spectrum—from Cam Thomas to Nikola Vucevic to the Devin Bookers, Paul Georges, and Evan Mobleys in between:
As a natural-born caretaker, Wagner rarely gambles in passing lanes. Playing alongside defensive wreckers like Jalen Suggs and Jonathan Isaac, disciplined wings like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Anthony Black, and mop-topped brick shithouses like Goga Bitadze, Wagner’s best role is just quietly filling in the blanks. Unlike his distant relative Kurt—sorry—Franz’s superpower isn’t instant teleportation. It’s patience and quick-strike timing, on both ends of the court. It is refreshing to see a player so wholly consistent in his ethic on offense and defense. The same judgment he has on one end, he uses for the other. The most succinct and cogent description of Franz I’ve ever read came from his older brother, Mo, who once called him “super observant.” Franz will always find where he’s needed.
Against a Lakers team that doesn’t have the bodies to keep him out of the lane, it was the long-gestating, probing drives so maligned by the L.A. announcers that made the most sense. Wagner took the Lakers to task with the ball in his hands, but he’s no slouch moving without it, either. In Phoenix earlier this week, the Magic gave the Suns a taste of their own medicine, using one of their pet plays against them—a Spain pick-and-roll that resulted in a wide-open 3 for Wagner as he hurtled himself around his own center to pop into wide-open space:
There’s something satisfying in watching Wagner play this season, like that particular snap of jigsaw pieces aligning perfectly. He hasn’t added anything particularly new to his game, outside of taking more of the Banchero-esque shots from the midrange. His process is just a bit more refined, a bit more assertive. It’s a testament to Wagner’s renewed confidence in his 3-point shot, which completely failed him last season and over the summer at the Paris Olympics but has now forced defenses to adjust their coverage. But it’s also just Wagner applying logic to situations before the opponent recognizes the pattern themselves. His processing speed is one reason why the Magic have been comfortable using him as their full-blown point forward. Even though he’s seeing the highest usage of his career, Wagner is posting a skyrocketing assist rate to go along with his lowest-ever turnover rate. But his lack of turnovers undersells his talent and creativity as a passer—there might not be more than a handful of wings better suited to the playmaking load Wagner’s taken on. He may not be eligible for an assist here given Gary Harris’s air ball, but how many players this side of LeBron can comfortably spray the ball out to the corner immediately out of a soft blitz from that far out?
“Seeing a lot of these coverages over and over again, going over them in my head, knowing what the counters are to them. I think, also, even if I made a couple shots or not, I’m not looking to score,” Wagner said after last week’s win over the Philadelphia 76ers. “Just continuing to be aggressive and being in that mindset where you can improvise out there and not predetermine stuff. I think that’s when, as a player, we get into a rhythm. And some of the stuff that you can’t predetermine or can’t plan for—that just kind of happens in the flow of the game—that’s also when it’s most fun.”
It won’t always be fun. There will be nights when he doesn’t have it. Games when the calculus of Banchero’s overwhelming physical dimensions would have made the difference. Moments when Paolo’s shadow will loom larger than even Orlando’s opponents do. There will be questions about that. Lord knows that Pippen fielded those the handful of times his Bulls tallied an unfortunate losing streak in 1993-94—whether he was enough in a world without Jordan. We caught a glimpse of that during Wednesday’s loss to the Clippers, on the first night of the Magic’s back-to-back in L.A. The Clippers were aggressive in denying Franz the ball, delivering bumps and bruises to keep him out of rhythm. He finished with 14 points, six rebounds, and six assists on three turnovers. Not bad, just not exactly what the Magic needed. In each of Wagner’s previous three games, he recorded at least 29 points and six assists (with no more than one turnover) in at least 36 minutes. The only other player in NBA history who has ever done that was Kyrie Irving in 2023.
In a clinical sense, stardom is a reflection of production scaled to the nth degree. Wagner’s versatility has made him a surefire pro and a clear supporting player since day one in the NBA, but this stretch without Banchero has shown that every single aspect of his game can be scaled up, with minimal effects on his overall efficiency. We haven’t yet seen Wagner’s upper limit in that regard. That’s an incredibly exciting prospect for Orlando. Banchero’s made it clear that he’s itching to play, targeting a return before Christmas. But it’s hard to imagine Orlando putting this version of Wagner back into the bottle. The Magic, out of necessity, asked him to show the full breadth of his talent; out of necessity, he complied. In a sense, he’s still the good soldier he’s always been. But now the Magic know just how good he can be with a little prodding. In that respect, Franz can find the solace that Pippen did a few decades ago.
“By him stepping away a little bit, it gave me a little room to grow,” Pippen said, back in 2014, of his time leading the Bulls without Jordan. “And when he came back, it gave me an opportunity to stand beside him instead of standing below him.”
