A fanbase isn’t a monolith, which makes talking about its collective desire basically impossible. In the way political pundits burn hours of airtime gabbing superciliously about the predilections of voters whom they don’t understand—calling someone an Iowan is scarcely descriptive, and I wouldn’t trust Peggy Noonan to know what it means anyway—sportswriters and panel show talking heads mostly waste their language when they muse on what season ticket holders in this or that market will or won’t do if a franchise scraps their roster for parts or splashes some money in free agency in an attempt to chase slim title hopes. For instance, Sam Hinkie acolytes, in the popular imagination, stand in for Sixers fans, but there were plenty of Philadelphians who didn’t buy what great Lincoln-misquoter was peddling. This is an obvious thing, but it’s worth stating: fans want different things. Some are championship-or-busters, some are pleased with a team that’s merely consistently competitive. Some spend their lunch breaks brainstorming trades, some will patiently watch a young core grow together. 

In short, it’s rare to be able to say this sort of thing with certainty: the Orlando Magic are not what anyone wants. The organization sending Dwight Howard to the Lakers in the summer of 2012 marked the beginning of what, four year later, has turned out to be an egregiously bungled rebuild. Howard has traveled from Orlando to Los Angeles to Houston to Atlanta and the Magic haven’t gone anywhere. 

To be fair to general manager Rob Hennigan, he hasn’t had much draft luck. In Orlando's first post-Dwight season, they were the worst team in the league at the worst possible time. The 2013 draft’s brightest talents were long-shot picks outside the top ten—Giannis Antetokounmpo, Rudy Gobert, Steven Adams—and Victor Oladipo was a fine choice at two, all things considered. The same is true of Aaron Gordon, whom Hennigan selected fourth in 2014, and no one complained at the time about the Magic trading up two slots to nab Elfrid Payton with the tenth pick. Mario Hezonja, who went one slot later than Kristaps Porzingis, is increasingly looking like a flat-out whiff but the players taken just behind him—Willie Cauley-Stein, Emmanuel Mudiay, Stanley Johnson, Frank Kaminsky—don’t seem to be stars in the making. 

The problem with building through the draft is when it doesn’t take, GMs tend to scramble for their jobs in ways that set the franchise back even further. In February, Hennigan shipped Tobias Harris to Detroit for Ersan Ilyasova and Brandon Jennings and gave Channing Frye to the Cavs for a second-round pick and a promptly waived Jared Cunningham, which indicated he was trying to bottom out. Then on draft night in June, he sent Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis to Oklahoma City for Serge Ibaka, and in July, he shelled out $15 million for a season of Jeff Green and spent $72 million locking down Bismack Biyombo for four years. Putting the fit and salary cap problems to one side—why spend so much money just to push Aaron Gordon to small forward?—what’s most troubling about the Magic’s 2016 is that Hennigan has been of multiple minds in the space of a single year. When the franchise was awful and hoarding lottery picks, at least they were operating under a clear (if undercooked) idea. Right now, they’re a many-intentioned mess. 

The only truly bad record in the NBA is one that represents disappointment. There’s a meaningful difference between losing 55 games by design and by accident, between making the playoffs when you didn’t expect to and barely squeaking in when you were a three-seed the previous year. The Magic are 13-and-17, which signifies a lot: they’re not quite league-worst but far from good; they have talent but it’s mismatched and misapplied; they can’t string three decent performances together; they’re in between giving up and going for it. They’re directionless. Hennigan is far off whatever course he plotted when he was first hired, and he’s going to lose his job because of it.

Going forward, there are crucial decisions to make, of course, because there always are. The Magic can take an L on the Oladipo trade and let a curiously rapidly aging Ibaka walk next summer rather than complicating matters by resigning him. It’s time to admit that Payton isn’t a starting point guard and look for a new one. Nik Vucevic’s trade value isn’t what it was two or three years ago, but he’s probably moveable. Whoever replaces Hennigan will have to sort out all of this and more, but essentially—and discouragingly—the next Magic GM’s best option is to erase the mistakes of his predecessor as completely as he can and start from scratch. Or scratch plus Bismack Biyombo and Aaron Gordon.

The reason you can find Sixers fans who still admire Sam Hinkie is that they feel he wasn’t allowed to follow through on his vision. They posit that he was on the right path and given another year or two, Hinkie would have finally assembled a suitably stocked stable of young stars and began to round the Sixers into playoff shape. The argument is powerful, if perhaps not convincing, because Hinkie never abandoned it. His commitment to his possibly doomed grand scheme was unwavering. You have to give him that, even if you believe him to be fundamentally fatuous and faux-erudite, and you have to concede that Hinkie left Bryan Colangelo with Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, and a surfeit of cap space and future traded picks, which is more than can be said of many fired front office executives.

The Magic, by contrast, are what happens when a man shows up full of conviction, in it for the long haul, and he gradually sells himself out. Rob Hennigan had a plan that, through his own mistakes and forces beyond his control, went to hell and as it did, he panicked and made a clumsy grab at gig-saving respectability. Abandoning your ideology, more than screwing up, is what will unite an entire fanbase in shared contempt. It’s an unforgivable error because it’s something over which you have complete control. It gets you run out of town with no one left to defend you.