The Magic will get a much needed rest. After playing Friday afternoon, Orlando will not play again until Wednesday night against Milwaukee. Magic Head Coach Stan Van Gundy also decided to give his players the weekend off.
"Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy has given his players this weekend off.“You don’t get that very often, but I’ve always found that when you do get more than one day off I think it makes a big difference in guys being able to refresh mentally and physically,” Van Gundy said. “I think the mental part of it gets even harder when you’re in a grind, you’re playing all the time, you’re playing good teams all the time.”The time off has arrived at the perfect juncture.“Especially when you have family around it’s good to be able to spend time with your family,” PG Jameer Nelson said. “We appreciate Coach for letting us have these days off.”"
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Jorge Diaz thinks that the Magic must find Superman’s cape or they won’t make it back to the finals.
"“I don’t know what the answer to that is,” Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy said. “We have not been able to establish him in the post against them and it’s frustrating because we should be able to. I have to find an answer to that. I’m frustrated. I’m not frustrated with Dwight. I’m frustrated with myself.”"
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Marc Stain, on the other hand, has named Dwight Howard his first trimester Eastern Conference MVP.
"And we’re going with Dwight, at this stage, despite LeBron’s trademark statistical supremacy as well as the monster load he has to carry to keep Cleveland up there with the rest of the title contenders, knowing James will undoubtedly be one of the two or three leading MVP contenders at season’s end.You can also bank on plenty of renewed discussion down the road about the holes in Howard’s offensive game or the frailties exposed by the Magic’s desultory performance against the Celtics on Christmas. This, though, is an opportunity — with the Cavs not really clicking until this week and LeBron not playing the same breakthrough D we saw last season — to highlight the stability provided by the game’s best big man. Howard has held his team together through plenty of early upheaval and with so many new guys moving into the Magic Kingdom."
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Orlando Magic Head Coach Stan Van Gundy doesn’t like Christmas games.
"“I think we get a little carried away with ourselves with sports thinking we’re more important than everything else,” Van Gundy said before the game. “But that’s the way it is. There’s nothing more important than the NBA on Christmas Day.”Van Gundy feels the day is best spent with family. He woke up early but managed to spend only about 15 minutes with his wife and four children. They went to church services the day before."
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Orlando will face the Milwaukee Bucks on Wednesday. Tania Ganguli talks about rookie phenom Brandon Jennings.
"And as questions about his readiness for the NBA disappear, so do questions about the sanity of skipping college uprooting one’s life and becoming a professional basketball player a year before NBA commissioner David Stern says so.“He always felt that he could do these things,” said Sonny Vaccaro, a former shoe company executive who brokered Jennings’ deal with the Italian Basketball club Lottomatica Vertus Roma and made him the first-ever basketball spokesman for Under Armor. “He never thought size was going to be an impediment. He wanted to do these things. … He punished himself by taking this the harder way instead of the easier way.“These are things indicative of his own self-made belief in himself.”"
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It sounds like former Magic star Tracy McGrady and Rockets Coach Rick Adelman have had it with each other.
"“You know, he was a great player,” Adelman said, “and you could go and run the offense through him and all the other guys benefited from it. But now if you’re going to do that, because of the injury and the rehabilitation coming back, he suddenly can’t do that and we can’t go to that. And now that that’s happened, it’s tough. So we’re trying to see if we can’t keep a flow where he can still get his touches yet we don’t have to put the whole onus on him right now, and that’s the dilemma. We need to play a certain way, and he needs to get a feel for what we’re doing. And we knew it was never going to be easy.”"
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Coming Monday: The Orlando Magic All-Decade Team
(Andrew Melnick is Howard the Dunk’s lead blogger and a contributor at NFL Mocks Subscribe to his RSS feed and add him on Twitter to follow him daily.)