Time for Orlando Magic to embrace the grind
The Orlando Magic are a young team reliant on offense to set the tone. To begin turning the corner, they have to find a way to win when the shots don’t fall
96. 142. 80. 38. Final
Not every game is going to call for 100 points. The shots do not fall every night. And when teams get good, it is a make or miss league.
No team can control the bounce of a basketball on the rim. It does weird things sometimes.
Execution is what matters. The process of getting the right shot is what matters. Commitment to the defensive end becomes paramount as the backstop for everything.
This is the grind. This is the way you scratch out wins and find ways to win when it does not seem possible. This is how you win in a game with fewer than 190 points from each team.
Orlando is far away from winning these games right now. The team does not quite have the defensive backstop, consistency or scheme to stop teams when the offense is not working.
This is still a team dictated by its offense. When the shots fall, the defensive energy picks up, the pace quickens and the offense flows. It is a cycle that feeds itself and can lead to a ton of success. Confidence grows when this happens.
So how do the Magic — how does any team? — gain confidence when the shots are not falling.
That is not easy to do. Especially for a young team.
Finding pride in a 93-89 win where both teams shoot in the low 40 percents is a hard thing to do. It takes a certain amount of professionalism and understanding to get to that point. With James Borrego preaching defense more and more, he seems to be trying to push his young team to come to this realization.
The Magic showed flashes of it Monday against the Wizards. Washington shot just 42.9 percent from the floor and did not make a 3-pointer in the first half. Orlando shot only 39.8 percent for the game (eventually the team’s undoing as the defense could not hold up long enough for the offense to catch up).
The Magic forced 22 turnovers and found a way to muck up the game. Those turnovers helped the Magic get the game sped up a bit more to their pace as they erased another early deficit and made it a close game through the second quarter. The rotations were better as the team seemed to scramble more in sync and close out on shooters.
The third quarter actually started out strong with a 24-second shot-clock violation.
A couple of missed shots followed and the Wizards answered by finally finding their stroke from 3-point range. The Wizards had broken the dam first and poured it on to grow the lead back to double digits for good.
Orlando never quite recovered defensively, and certainly not offensively without a system to trust and grind through in the hard times like tonight.
This system and this mentality probably will not happen this season. This Magic team is too young and, frankly, does not have the identity or scheme established to get there in 30 short games. This mentality is a mentality that is built in training camp, reinforced by the coaching staff time and time again and practiced and preached over everything — process over results, remember?
The failure of this team to this point has been the struggle to establish this identity and embrace and rely on the grind. This ability was always the most impressive part of the 2009 and 2010 teams. Even on their worst days, they usually found a way to win and compete.
Right now, on the Magic’s worst days, things get really really ugly.
The 82-game schedule is a long one. Not every game is going to be perfect. The shots will not fall every night. The only thing that can remain consistent is defense and effort. Those have been in question all season. Until they get answered definitively and consistently, this team is going to struggle and need every little thing to go right to have a chance to win.
That is where the Magic must search to find their identity and build momentum for the offseason. At least, for now, we are seeing it in flashes. There is reason to believe it will come together when Rob Hennigan institutes the next part of his plan, provided they bring in the right coach who gets the team to focus the right way.
It is still all glimmers though of what this team can become.