The Orlando Magic should now see what they cannot do, or at least see what they don’t do well enough. They shoot poorly, and they often compound their woes by abandoning their game plan. They neglect to move the basketball, fail to get the ball into the paint and too often allow their offense to stagnate with errant dribbling.
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Those tendencies caused a humiliating loss Friday night to the Charlotte Hornets, 120-88, at Amway Center.
“You never want to play like that,” forward Aaron Gordon said. “Especially in the second game of the season.”
There is a difference between knowing a team’s weaknesses and knowing a team’s collective character.
How does a team respond to setbacks? How tough is it? Does it recover from disappointment?
Those answers should come into focus right away.
After their crushing loss to the Hornets, the Magic boarded a chartered jet bound for Philadelphia. The Magic will face the 76ers Saturday night on the second leg of a difficult back-to-back. Some teams don’t face a difficult mental test until a few months of the season elapse; for the Magic, the test will come ridiculously early, in Game 3.
“In the NBA, if you want to be a good team, you have to be able to improve upon bad losses quickly,” center Nikola Vucevic said.
“You can’t dwell on things. But at the same time, you have to take a moment and kind of study what happened, why things went wrong tonight. Why was it so bad? And (you have to) turn around quickly and come back tomorrow and be ready to play, especially against a team like Philly. I think we have what it takes to turn this thing around. You can’t dwell on things, but obviously, it will show our character how we come out tomorrow and play.”
It would be difficult to overstate how awful the Magic looked on offense against the Hornets. Orlando managed only 10 first-quarter points and made just 19 percent of its 3-point tries overall.
Coach Steve Clifford preaches to his players that they need to get the ball into the paint — through drives or passes or cuts — to collapse the defense and create space on the perimeter for spot-up 3s. On Friday, Orlando played lethargically on offense and often settled for merely decent shots instead of working for good shots.
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Consider a possession with 8:25 remaining in the first quarter. Swingman Evan Fournier held the ball near the right corner with Jeremy Lamb guarding him closely. Fournier then stepped back and launched an ill-advised, contested 3 over Lamb’s outstretched right hand with eight seconds left on the shot clock. The ball arced high into the air and fell toward the ground without ever hitting the rim or the backboard. Air ball.
“There’s not much to say,” Fournier said. “When you lose by 40, it’s almost like you can flush it down the toilet. That’s got to be the mindset, and we’ve got to bounce back tomorrow. It was a poor performance on every level. You can’t have nights like that. It’s going to happen, but it’s got to be once or twice a year, those nights. That’s it.”
Fournier should know. Now in his fifth season with the Magic, he has seen the team struggle to end losing streaks. Last November, after three consecutive losses on the West Coast, the Magic returned home to Amway Center and lost to the Utah Jazz 125-85, the most lopsided home defeat in franchise history. Fournier and his teammates never recovered. Before their futility finally ended, the Magic had lost 16 of 17 games, and their season was in ruins. The team fired Frank Vogel immediately after the season ended.
One of Clifford’s tasks as Orlando’s new coach is to infuse the team with some backbone, some toughness.
After the loss to the Hornets, he disagreed that the game in Philadelphia will test his team’s character. He said offense develops at a slower pace than defense, especially with a new coach and new X-and-O schemes. And he insisted effort was not the issue Friday. As proof, he pointed out that his team limited Charlotte to 39 percent shooting in the first half; if Orlando players weren’t trying, then they would not have been as successful as they were on defense.
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“The guy most in charge of how we play is me,” Clifford told reporters. “Like I just told them, I have to help them more. Offense, (and) why it’s a lot harder than defense, is being on the same page in terms of how you have to play. We need to play faster.”
Yet Clifford ignored, or perhaps doesn’t know, one disconcerting fact: that his predecessors — Jacque Vaughn, interim coach James Borrego, Scott Skiles and Vogel — never could quite get Magic players out of bad habits on offense.
Orlando trailed 51-31 at halftime Friday, and Clifford said he thought at the time that his team still had a chance to win the game. In retrospect, that seems overly optimistic. His team had generated only one free-throw attempt the entire first half, and Fournier, one of the team’s key scorers, opened the game 0 for 7 from the field, continuing a maddening slump that started during the preseason.
The defeat extended Orlando’s losing streak to Charlotte to 12 games — a streak that started on Jan. 22, 2016, when Clifford was the Hornets’ coach.
The Sixers, who reached the Eastern Conference semifinals last June, likely will provide an even tougher test.
“We’re going to have better purpose, that’s for sure,” Fournier said. “But it’s not going to erase what we did tonight. It’s too late already. I don’t know how we’re going to play (against Philly). But last year, we won the first game against Miami, we lost in Brooklyn in a disappointing loss and we had a terrific game in Cleveland. So we’ll see, man. We’ll see.”
The answer will tell a lot about the 2018-19 Magic.
(Top photo of Terrence Ross: Kim Klement / USA TODAY Sports)