Orlando Magic close out preseason with more good, more bad
The Orlando Magic continued to show progress, but continued to show imperfection as their preseason closed with a win over the Memphis Grizzlies.
38. 76. 211. Final. 86
Everything that has been wrong about the Orlando Magic through Friday’s preseason finale against the Memphis Grizzlies was seen in one play. Everything that could be right and the mentality Scott Skiles was preaching all preseason sank in though in the immediate response.
Midway through the fourth quarter, the Magic led the Grizzlies by seven points when Dewayne Dedmon gave up a possession on a bad handoff to Lazeric Jones. Jones had a clear path for a transition layup.
Dedmon was sprinting though. And closing fast. Jones prepared to gather and Dedmon was on him. Jones had to pass it to Alex Stepheson for what should have been an easy layup. Dedmon was there again, rotating perfectly to block the shot and start the Magic’s own secondary break.
The ball easily found itself to Andrew Nicholson on the wing for an open 3-pointer and the Magic had a 10-point lead. Even with no starters in the game for either team, the Magic had pulled out the stops and done enough for a 86-76 win over the Grizzlies at Amway Center to close out the preseason.
| Score | Off. Rtg. | eFG% | O.Reb.% | TO% | FTR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Memphis | 76 | 81.1 | 36.2 | 28.6 | 20.3 | 38.2 |
| Orlando | 86 | 93.0 | 44.0 | 32.0 | 18.4 | 20.2 |
Brandan Wright (MEM) — 11 pts., 9 rebs.; Jarnell Stokes (MEM) — 10 pts.
Tobias Harris (ORL) — 18 pts., 10 rebs.; Shabazz Napier (ORL) — 15 pts.
Orlando had the lull and found the play to spark their revival, going on an 11-2 run to build a 16-point lead and put the game away. It was a moment where the Magic made a mistake and immediately turned it around and into a positive.
“[Scott Skiles] teaches to just drop the bottle as it were,” Dedmon said. “I knew I made the turnover and I had to get it back and make up for it.”
He certainly did that in his burst down the floor. Dedmon finished with five points and 11 rebounds, blocking two shots to try to counteract four turnovers.
That kind of line was emblematic of the Magic’s play throughout the preseason. Dedmon showed improved patience and timing on his defensive rotations and block attempts throughout the preseason, but still had moments where he would fall back into the mistakes of previous years — getting into foul trouble or being imprecise with the ball.
This was constant throughout the last month and plenty of signs of work still to do for the Magic.
“We can’t rely on one play to get us going when we’ve been sluggish for so long,” Skiles said. “We’ve got to get ourselves going. It’s something we’re clearly not a finished product in. It’s something we need a lot of work on. Just sort of playing every possession, staying in the moment, playing them all hard, trying to play them well, knowing the other team has a say so in whether we play the possession well.
“We have a tendency to kind of all of us together to go in one direction and then we wait for a play like that to happen. And then we get it going again. Great play by Dewayne, but it’s also a sign a little bit of our immaturity.”
Even without Memphis’ key players in the game, the Magic could count on a solid win where the offense did just enough and the defense held serve for much of the night. Orlando held Memphis to 32.9 percent shooting and 5 for 23 from beyond the arc.
Of course, take all this with a grain of salt. Marc Gasol, Zach Randolph, Tony Allen and Mike Conley all sat out the game. The Magic still played most of their starters for much of the game. They dominated the start of the game and then lost focus as the game went on.
That lack of focus and precision for parts of the game was evident, but the Magic largely held the lead through the game. Tobias Harris scored 18 points for the Magic and grabbed 10 rebounds.
Shabazz Napier did a good job controlling the ball and probing into the paint, scoring 15 points and dishing out eight assists. His comfort was evident as he led the second unit for much of the second half and helped secure the win. The Magic outscored the Grizzlies 38-22 in the paint.
With so little on the line though, there was no real sense of where the Magic stood following this game. The Grizzlies simply did not give them a good gauge on it.
So the Magic once again saw some very strong moments and some troubling moments that will need work. That inconsistency has been pretty consistent throughout the eight-game preseason schedule.
“There is a lot of goods and a lot of bads,” Harris said. “[Skiles is] on us, he shows us clips of the bads and the goods. We know when we’re locked in defensively it’s hard for teams to score. That needs to be our focus night in and night out.”
The regular season has arrived. The Magic made plenty of progress from the beginning of training camp, but there is certainly more work to do.