The Orlando Magic have struggled holding off runs throughout the season. Saturday night, they came together and stomped the Chicago Bulls at home.
The Orlando Magic could have lost all the momentum and strong play they had built in the first half midway through the third quarter. It had happened so many times before.
Those first six minutes of the second half when a team can either put their foot down and blow a team out, see their lead wilt away or things turn the opposite way. With Nikola Vucevic and Victor Oladipo out again, the Magic easily could have wilted.
Not this time.
There was a sometimes vulgar meeting of the minds in that timeout. Evan Fournier spoke up first. Then Dewayne Dedmon. Then Aaron Gordon. Everyone seemed to speak up and create the lively discussion the team needed to snap back to attention.
“Just get back to what we was doing,” Elfrid Payton said about what was said at that timeout. “We kind of got on each other. I think that really helped us. We were able to get back out there and get back in transition and get the lead back up.”
The basic message from each player was to wake up — in a lot more vulgar words, as Aaron Gordon put it, the team is “too old” to be sensitive to this kind of criticism — as the Chicago Bulls cut the Magic’s 18-point halftime lead down to nine. When the Magic got back onto the court, they were a different team again.
The intense, focused team that had run the Bulls out of the gym in the first half and ran them even further out in the second, taking as much as a 29-point lead.
Shorthanded or not, this was the kind of effort the Magic needed and had been inching toward with little result for some time. They sustained the focus for more than just a few minutes or a few stretches and banked a 111-89 win over the Bulls at Amway Center on Saturday.
| Score | Off. Rtg. | eFG% | O.Reb.% | TO% | FTR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago | 89 | 91.3 | 44.3 | 22.4 | 13.3 | 19.3 |
| Orlando | 111 | 116.5 | 57.9 | 29.3 | 13.6 | 13.5 |
Dewayne Dedmon (ORL) — 18 pts., 13 rebs.; Elfrid Payton (ORL) — 15 pts.
Taj Gibson (CHI) — 16 pts.; Jimmy Butler (CHI) — 12 pts.
“I thought we responded really well,” coach Scott Skiles said. “You just got to put your foot down when that happens. You have to get a stop and a basket, a stop and a basket and all of a sudden it’s back up to 14 or 15. It’s not that the tother team quits, but you have at least established that run is over and if they want to get back in it, they have to make another one.”
The Bulls did not make another serious threat at the lead. The Magic indeed put their foot down.
After that timeout early in the third quarter, Orlando went on a 5-0 run immediately and finished the final 6:07 of the third quarter outscoring Chicago 15-6, the same margin Chicago put on Orlando in the first half of the third.
That was enough to crush the Bulls seemingly. Where the first half was about the team’s offense, the Magic were suffocating defensively in the second half.
“We’ve had a lot of, not always a full game, but halves, quarters where we are very energetic, we see each other, we play unselfishly,” Skiles said. “Our pace was excellent. We pushed the ball up after makes and misses. We had other times that we haven’t. Tonight we did it very well. We pushed it. But the main thing was we saw each other. We had several hockey assists and just a lot of good unselfish play. When we do that we look like a legitimate team.”
Orlando was in control seemingly from the opening tip. They took a 14-point lead after the first quarter and scored 36 points in the opening 12 minutes. Chicago was lackadaisical on defense and Orlando was able to run pick and rolls and get in the lane with tremendous ease.
Elfrid Payton set up Dewayne Dedmon throughout the game for lobs and dump downs and Dedmon worked the glass hard throughout the game. He tied his career-high 12 points by the middle of the second quarter on his way to 18 points and 13 rebounds. Payton posted 15 points and 10 assists, slinking into the lane easily.
That just set everything else up offensively as the Magic shot 53.9 percent from the floor. They were in firm control with 68 points at halftime.
What was not always settled was the defense, although it sharpened up at several key moments particularly in the second half where the Magic gave up just 80.7 points per 100 possessions and 39 points total.
It was one of the best, most complete halves of basketball the Magic have played. And having that come on the tails of a strong first half was telling for a team desperate for a win.
“They came back because we started to stop being aggressive and stopped moving the ball,” Evan Fournier said. “When we play like that, we’re just not good. We had to refocus, talk to each other. That’s how basically we killed the game.”
They did indeed put their foot down and kept stomping until the Bulls were out.
Whether it is a big step will not be fully revealed until the next opportunity for the Magic to do this again. It is hard even then to say whether this is some turning point with just nine games remaining (and despite my error last night, a super thin margin for error to make the Playoffs — one Pacers win or one Magic loss will eliminate the Magic from the Playoffs now).
Skiles said the next logical step for the team to take is to become more consistent in these situation. There is not enough time in the season to say whether this becomes some turning point for the team. It was still important and still improvement, even against a moribund Bulls team.
The Magic put out the first punch and kept holding the Bulls off, putting their foot down in the second half and closing out the game strong.
Next: What now for the Orlando Magic?
“That’s something we talked about being able to stop the bleeding,” Payton said. “Time after time, teams go on a run and we don’t ever recover from it. We did a good job of that tonight. It’s a big step.”