Fast breaking Orlando Magic, not quite breaking
The Orlando Magic said at the beginning of the season they wanted to be a running team. That did not happen in 2015 and it is why the Magic struggled.
It took 41 games for the Magic to become the Orlando Magic. Or, at least, the Orlando Magic everyone expected at the beginning of the season.
The Magic struggled to generate fast break opportunities. They struggled to pick up the pace and found their offense bogged down in the half court.
The numbers bear this out. The Magic had just four games played at a pace faster than 100 possessions per game before that Chicago game in January. Then they put together three in four games (at Chicago and vs. Houston and vs. Oklahoma City). On the season, the Magic played only six games at a pace greater than 100 possesions.
Orlando had trouble dictating tempo and picking the pace up.
They wanted to be a running team but did not act like it. The Magic finished the season playing at a pace of 93.8 possessions per game, according to Basketball-Reference. That was good to be in the middle of the league.
That stretch in January, though? The Magic played faster and with more aggression. With James Borrego as head coach, the Magic played at a 95.3 pace, according to NBA.com. It was still in the bottom half of the league, and overall it was slower than their full season average according to NBA.com.
The brief moment in time where the team ran at such breakneck speeds in January. That seemed to be how the Magic always wanted to play — or at least an extreme version of the speed and pace they ultimately wanted with so many young, athletic players.
“It gives us opportunities,” Channing Frye said. “It gives us opportunities to play at the pace we have been trained to play at. We run all these conditioning tests at the beginning of the year. We don’t do that to score 80 points per game. For me, it’s taking advantage of who we are as players.”
For the first half of the season, the Magic did a lot of talking about playing at a faster pace, but not a whole lot of playing at that faster pace.
When everyone looked at the roster and saw young, athletic players like Elfrid Payton and Victor Oladipo on the roster along with draft pick Aaron Gordon and slasher Maurice Harkless set to remain in the rotation, it seemed to make the most sense for this team to push the pace.
After all, the Magic did not have a ton of shooters. They were a team with athletes who could create turnovers and turn those turnovers into quick points or get into a secondary break set and take advantage of a defense still shifting out of transition.
“I think it’s an advantage for us to play fast,” Nikola Vucevic said before the season. “We’ve got a lot of guys that are athletic and can run. With us being a young team, it’s something we have to do, but it all starts with the defense. We’ve got to get stops. We have to be aggressive on teh defensive end. It’s hard to run if we don’t get stops. You’ve got to be able to get stops and as soon as we get stops, we have to go out there and run which makes the game a lot easier for us. Once we get easy buckets, the rim will look bigger for everybody.”
It was the defense that was the problem for the Magic all season.
Orlando finished with a 105.2 defensive rating, 25th in the league. They struggled to force turnovers with a 15.0 percent turnover forced rate, again middle of the league. The Magic were not forcing a ton of turnovers and were not creating fast break opportunities.
“It’s a balance for us,” James Borrego said. “We want to play fast and we want to run because we do have athletes and young legs that can do that. We have to get stops first. That will allow us to run. When we do get stops, we should be the first team down the floor. When we’re on makes and we have to get set, our focus is to execut ea play for the most part and get good shots.”
In all, the Magic scored 11.8 percent of their shots in transition this season, 19th in the league.
It raised the somewhat serious question if the Magic were right to try to become a fast-breaking team. Was this the right idea for this Magic team to succeed? There certainly were struggles in the half court anyway.
The Magic just could not figure out the right way to play all season. As has been noted time and time again, this lack of identity seemed to hurt the Magic as they tried to win games this season.
This is a team that seems suited to run, but really what they have to do is learn how to control the pace of the game whether they are running or not. It is not simply about running to run and get out in transition, but also to run with control and get the opponent on its heels.
The reason the Magic needed to be able to get out in transition was to catch the defense off guard to avoid running their still lackluster half-court offense. It came down to being able to stop your individual man on defense to kickstart and generate easy offense.
It was all a work in progress. The failure to establish this seemingly easy identity was an undercurrent of the season.
It was in that moment when the Magic seemed to figure out the mentality they needed to succeed. There is a reason the wins over the Bulls and Rockets in back-to-back games seemed to stick out through the long slog of an 82-game season.
“At the end of the day, if your intention is a positive one, then you can live with some turnovers,” Victor Oladipo said. “It’s a game, it’s an imperfect game. As bad as you want to be perfect, you can’t be. At the end of the day, we’ve just got to continue to stay positive. We found the way we need to play and we can’t differ, no matter what. We’ve just got to continue to keep playing hard.”
This is a hard thing for a young team to realize. There are so many opportunities to force plays or be fast just to be fast. Playing without the fear of mistake is a major step the Magic still have to take.
Whoever the new coach is will surely implement a new style, but they will likely still tell the team to run. Speed has to be a part of the team’s identity.
If anything, that will be beneficial even for slower players like Nikola Vucevic and Channing Frye who could catch teams sleeping by trailing the play and spotting up from their favorite spots as the Magic’s guards attack the hoop with their athleticism and speed.
Running will be a part of the Magic’s identity. The roster makeup seems to dictate that unless the team suddenly grows up and matures into a team that can execute in the half court.
Whatever the case might be, the Magic’s desire to run fell short in 2015. It haunted them throughout the entire disappointing season.