Upon first glance, the Orlando Magic appear to be a tidy little success story. Fresh off a miserable 2004 campaign in which they finished an astounding 40 games under .500,Orlando has turned things around remarkably quickly and, at 26-24, has already topped last season’s win total with room to spare.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll see the same underlying problem that produced the 21-61 season: terrible personnel decisions. Yes, the Magic are winning, but the catalyst was two lucky breaks: The return of Grant Hill, and getting the top pick in the draft, with which they selected Dwight Howard.

Hill’s long-term absence was the major reason the Magic couldn’t contend despite Tracy McGrady’s back-to-back scoring titles. While Hill spent most of the past three years rehabbing his ankle, he tied up nearly a third of Orlando’s salary cap space. His return to All-Star status is amazing, but the Magic’s front office has to be evaluated in light of the incredible fortune that fell into its lap.

Similarly, ending up with the top pick was another fortuitous circumstance. Had Orlando not won the lottery, they likely would have ended up with a player like Shaun Livingston or Devin Harris, whose impact wouldn’t have been as immediate. Instead, the opportunity to choose between Howard and Emeka Okafor gave them their pick of nightly double-double threats.

Give Magic President Jon Weisbrod credit for picking the younger of the two in Howard, who is already averaging close to a double-double. Weisbrod’s selection of Jameer Nelson later in the first round with the 20th pick also shapes up as a decent pick, making his first draft as the new guy in charge a stark contrast to recent Magic draft travesties such as Reece Gaines and Ryan Humphrey.

Nonetheless, Weisbrod has received too much credit for overhauling this team. When you factor in the two strokes of luck that came his way and the fact that he had a midlevel exception to use, it wasn’t hard for him to put a winning team on the floor. But the Magic would be considerably better than they are now if not for several poor decisions.

Let’s begin with the decision to trade Tracy McGrady. Weisbrod sent his leading scorer, along with Tyronn Lue and Juwan Howard, to Houston for Steve Francis, Cuttino Mobley, and Kelvin Cato. The deal assured that McGrady’s casual attitude toward defense wouldn’t infect the other players, but the cost was huge: It puts Orlando over the cap for several more years. If the Magic had played out another year with McGrady and determined that he wasn’t a fit, they could have ended up several million dollars under the cap and signed another star talent to join Hill and Howard. Instead, the Magic won’t get under the cap until at least 2007, and in the meantime have a player in Francis who, though talented, isn’t on the same plane as McGrady.

Weisbrod then made a bad deal worse at midseason when he traded Mobley to the Kings for veteran Doug Christie. It’s becoming more obvious with each passing day how badly the Magic got snookered on this deal. I’m not sure how to put this more delicately: Christie, the one-time defensive linchpin of the Kings, is finished.

The exclamation point came Saturday, when he helped “hold” Philadelphia’s Allen Iverson to 60 points and contributed just one basket of his own. Christie, who turns 35 in May, is battling chronic foot problems, and his scoring average of seven points a game is his worst since Pat Riley fly papered him to the Knicks’ bench in 1994-95.

Weisbrod reasoned at the time that he needed to separate Francis and Mobley, which is perfectly understandable. As teammates in Houston and again in Orlando, they were basketball monogamists, passing only to each other while playing keep away from the other three players. But to take such a bath on talent was a major error.

Weisbrod made the decision in part due to a faulty reading of Orlando’s defensive prowess. With the Magic allowing 100.6 points per game – which ranks 27th in the league – he had assumed that Orlando’s defense was preventing the team from winning.

In reality, Orlando’s defense isn’t bad at all. The problem is that the Magic play at the league’s fastest pace, faster even than the turbo-charged Phoenix Suns. As a result, Orlando’s points allowed are hugely inflated. Per possession, the Magic field the league’s 13th-best defense. In reality, it’s their 17thranked offense that’s the bigger problem, especially now that they’ve traded Mobley for an offensive vacuum.

A few other terrible decisions are also holding the Magic back. They made the indefensible move to protect monolithic forward Pat Garrity in the expansion draft, thus losing promising center Zaza Pachulia. Even if Garrity had been selected by Charlotte, losing him would hardly have done any damage since he alternates between being injured and being awful. Pachulia, meanwhile, has played well for Milwaukee (Charlotte traded his rights), and at age 21 is the Bucks’ center of the future.

Finally, there’s the off-season trade of Drew Gooden, which is shaping up to be one of the worst deals in history. Before the season, Orlando essentially gave up on the talented but occasionally flighty forward after two NBA seasons, trading Gooden, center Steven Hunter, and second-round draft choice Anderson Varejao to Cleveland for Tony Battie and two second-round draft picks.

Gooden has become one of the league’s better power forwards in Cleveland while Varejao has sparkled off the bench. Hunter, meanwhile, surfaced in Phoenix and has thrived as the Suns’ key frontcourt reserve. Meanwhile, Battie has struggled as the Magic’s backup center.

So Weisbrod has Dwight Howard, Hill, and Nelson on his side this year, but the parts surrounding them are much less than they could be. He has Francis and Christie instead of McGrady and Juwan Howard. He has Battie instead of Gooden, Varejao, and Hunter. He has Garrity instead of Pachulia.

As a result, the Magic are 26-24 when they could be 10 games better with a raft of cap space coming this summer. I’m not pretending Weisbrod’s task was easy when he took over, and certainly he made a couple of steps in the right direction. But among the huge number of personnel moves in his first year at the helm, many have proven to be disastrous. Long term, the young Howard’s impending greatness may make the Magic a winner anyway, but Weisbrod’s recent misdeeds have made that road much longer than it needs to be.