BROOKLYN, N.Y. — It’s a cold late-January Wednesday night, down in the bowels of Barclays Center after the Orlando Magic have dropped a close game to the Nets, and Aaron Gordon's megawatt smile is turned upside down.
If his left leg was bouncing up and down any faster, he could be one of the best drummers in the world. Neil Peart has nothing on him right now. Sorry, Ringo; hand him the sticks.
This was not one of Gordon’s better days, and not one of his better games.
The Magic have fallen to the Nets, their ninth loss in 14 games, their playoff hopes hanging by a thread, and Gordon was bad. Not OK, not mediocre, not off his game.
Bad.
Is this OK? Is this allowed?
Is a face of a franchise — as he’s become for Orlando, an $80 million man — allowed to frown?
• • •
One of Gordon’s lasting McKale Center memories is of the high-flyer throwing down the receiving end of a T.J. McConnell alley-oop, running back down the court and grinning from sideline to sideline.
The grin is gone today, as is his game.
It started off nicely enough.
On Orlando’s first possession of the game, Gordon drives into the lane and displays solid court awareness, finding Jonathan Isaac in the top corner for a wide-open 3-pointer. With 10 minutes left in the second, another great pass, this one to rookie prodigy Mo Bamba, who misses the corner 3.
A few minutes later, Gordon backs down his defender deep into the paint, pivots and lays the ball in.
Offensively, he’s showing off a variety of skills, even if he’s not scoring much. More on that later.
But defensively, the stiffness of not playing for a few days is showing.
Trailing by eight midway through the second quarter, Gordon misses a shot and then watches as former Spencer Dinwiddie, a former Colorado Buffalo turned Brooklyn standout, blows past him for a dunk to make it a double-digit lead.
This? This is uncharacteristic for Gordon, who has blossomed into Orlando’s best defender this season, regularly drawing a head-to-head matchup with the opponent’s best scorer.
“He didn’t have his rhythm all night, on either end of the floor,” Orlando coach Steve Clifford said after the game. “He even struggled defensively. We weren’t going to play him his normal minutes. When you’re playing as much as we are and then you miss days, it’s not lack of effort, he just wasn’t himself out there at all.”
On this day, it feels like Gordon is not just battling the Nets but Murphy’s Law. And the law wins.
He’s on the ground stretching late in the game, and a player crashes onto him. Not 10 minutes later, he’s knocked to the ground by an errant shoulder.
“I definitely feel like my performance wasn’t good enough across the board,” he said after the game. “I try to take it upon myself, but my defense was piss-poor.”
Gordon will finish with a pedestrian line — 10 points, six rebounds, two assists, one block, two turnovers, negative-16 plus-minus ratio — and he’ll attempt just nine shots, his eighth time in single-digits this year.
Nikola Vucevic, who has become a 20-10 man for the Magic, hasn’t attempted fewer than 10 once this year.
Just two days later, Gordon will score 22 and grab 11 rebounds while tallying six assists, his 12th time with 20-plus points this year. He’ll go for 23 points one day later against Houston.
But he’s only got one 30-point game, back in mid-November against the Knicks. Too often, he defers to lesser players. Too often, he finds himself lost in the offense.
People are starting to wonder: Where’s the AG who scored 40 points in a late-November win over Oklahoma City last year, only to follow up with a 39 points game a month and a day later against the Miami Heat? Where’s the AG who led the NBA in 3-point shooting early last year?
Is a face of a franchise — as he’s become for Orlando — allowed to flounder?
• • •
It’s almost unfathomable, but despite being in the middle of his fifth NBA season, Gordon isn’t even halfway to 24. He was born Sept. 16, 1995. For comparison, Grayson Allen, the first senior taken in the NBA draft this year, was born less than a month later.
You can’t expect Gordon to be a finished product, which is a big reason the Magic locked him in last summer for four years at a reported base salary of $76 million, with incentives that could raise the deal another $8 million.
They see a ton of potential in him, and rightly so. Few players in the NBA possess his combination of raw athleticism, pure strength and earth-orbiting dunking ability.
They even know the next step for him.
“I don’t think he knows his own strength,” said longtime professional point guard D.J. Augustin, a 2008 NBA draft pick who has played alongside Gordon for three seasons. “Sometimes it’s hard when you have a lot of good players who can do different things. Sometimes you don’t want to try to do too much. That’s what I’ve seen so much from him this year. He’s looked like he’s looking to pass, facilitate more.
“And that’s a good thing, when he draws so many double-teams. But he has to get a mindset of being aggressive, and knowing when to be aggressive.”
Gordon spent the summer in San Jose working on his game, putting up more than 300 shots a day. His shooting has bounced back from 43 percent last year to 46 percent this year, though he is shooting almost two fewer attempts per game. He has also sustained his outside shooting better (35.4 percent), as his hot streak cooled off quickly last year when he finished at 33.6 percent from deep.
The effort hasn’t been lost on his teammates.
“This is my third year with him, and looking back to my first summer with him, he wasn’t doing any of these moves,” Augustin said. “Every summer, he’s getting better. Learning new tricks of the trade. He works really hard behind the scenes. A lot of people don’t know how hard he works.”
“Offensively, he’s grown a lot,” Vucevic added. “He’s playing at a much slower pace, trying to let the game come to him. His shot has improved (and so has) his playmaking. When he’s out we miss him. It’s tough to get out of that hole. It was good to have him back, even if he was a little rusty.”
The rust will shake off, that much he knows.
Besides, Vucevic knows: Gordon is so much more than his scoring.
• • •
Back to the fame.
For those who’ve followed Gordon since his brief Arizona career, when he helped the Wildcats advance to the 2014 Elite Eight in his lone season, the question wasn’t if the high-flyer put his megawatt smile to good use, but when.
Gordon cashed in on his game this summer. He also went Hollywood, playing one of the protagonists in the Kyrie Irving-led “Uncle Drew” movie. At the movie’s premiere in New York in June, he looked every penny of the $80 million man.
“We felt like he would be just extremely beneficial in terms of what he brought to the movie,” Irving told the Orlando Sentinel last summer. “It’s great to have a guy like him. And Aaron Gordon the person is unbelievable. To have him as an actor in the movie, making his debut and playing a prominent role in our movie? It’s just going to make it that much better. So I’m appreciative of him taking advantage of the opportunity.”
Taking advantage of opportunities has become Gordon’s calling card in Orlando, particularly in the community.
“His whole career with the Magic, he’s done things for the kids, blocking out a theatre for Uncle Drew, golf tournaments,” Augustin said. “He does a lot but he doesn’t talk about it.”
Becoming the face of the franchise has had its perks, Gordon said, but perhaps none more than being able to give back to the community that has embraced him, and his team.
Inspired by similar programs in the San Francisco area and New York, Gordon announced in December the creation of CodeOrlando, a STEM program designed for Orlando youth that has become of Gordon’s most important pet projects.
“I believe knowledge is power,” Gordon said. “Using your mind is freeing. It’s liberating. It grants you a lot of things in life. It’s a way to show kids you don’t have to rap or play basketball to make millions of dollars. There are others ways to do it.”
All of them, it seems, with a smile on your face.
Most of the time, anyway.