The Orlando Magic are trying to correct the course of their season after falling off the last month. The trip to London has the feel of a turning point.
Evan Fournier has good reason to look forward to this upcoming week. There is a rare opportunity for his family to see him play in a meaningful NBA game.
For players like Fournier, Nikola Vucevic and Mario Hezonja, family, friends and countrymen will likely travel across Europe to see the Orlando Magic take on the Toronto Raptors on Thursday. Countless other NBA fans will likely do the same with a regular season game taking place on European soil.
It will be nice for these players specifically. And especially for Fournier, who said he has not seen his family since leaving France this offseason (he played in Eurobasket this past summer in France, so he was certainly very busy when he was home this summer).
Fournier said he hopes he will have time to spend time with his family. Magic players traveling to London for the first time likely hope to get some time to see the sights.
But he also said this is a business trip. And it has to be.
“Yeah, it’s a turning point of the season, definitely,” Fournier said. “Almost halfway into the season, pretty much right now is where teams start winning or the opposite, get tired or forget what’s working for them. You want to be on the other side of that.”
The Magic head to London losers of five of their past six games, seeking some form of positive momentum to propel them into the second half of the season. With just one game now this week, the Magic have time to prepare and get things right in practice — one in Orlando on Monday before leaving for London and then open practices Tuesday and Wednesday before Thursday’s game.
That amount of practice time is rare in the course of the season. But it is also somewhat disruptive to the rhythm of the season. The team had to play six games in nine nights to start January just to prepare for essentially a week off from games.
All those considerations are somewhat secondary. The Magic are trying to right the ship.
“We’ve got to use it the right way,” Nikola Vucevic said. “We’ll have some time to practice and work on things we didn’t do well both before and after the game. And spend some time off the court. I think times like that can always help build up team chemistry, talk about some issues we have on the court.
“It can be a very good trip for us if we use it the right way. We can’t look at it as a vacation, but as a business trip where we have to take care of business.”
This is no mini training camp, that is for sure.
The Magic have great off-court chemistry — the players all get along and are friendly — and so that aspect of the cross-country trip seems to have a little less emphasis. Certainly less than it did when the team traveled to Brazil during the preseason.
The focus on this trip is, and should be, about getting a win. Everything else seems secondary.
What this trip needs to be about is finding a way to turn the season back around. There is no doubt the Magic have seen a sharp decline and their position within the Playoff pecking order has slowly diminished. Entering Sunday’s games, the Magic are in ninth place, percentage points behind the Boston Celtics for the final playoff spot.
But their focus should be less on the standings and more on themselves.
They have seen their defense slip and slip in the past month. The team has been extremely inconsistent. The hot start has faded into the past. To the point where the Magic are trying to get back to their basic principles and re-establish their identity, it seems.
It is hard to say any game in January is a “must-win” game. That level of urgency should not exist. There are ups and downs to every season, the trick for good teams is limiting those down stretches.
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Orlando is in its first real down stretch of the season. The team is searching for that rhythm again.
While this individual game — the focus of an entire week for both teams — is not a must-win, it does feel like the season is on a precipice. The Magic have to define who they are again for the rest of the season.
“It could go both ways really,” Fournier said. “It could help us or the opposite — hurt us. It’s a long trip. It’s a huge game for us against a very good team. If we lose to that team, it could break our spirit. We really have to take this trip seriously as professionals.”
With where the Magic are at, there will not be too much fun and games on the trip to London. It has to be a business trip because the team and the season could still fall in either direction.