The Orlando Magic will play the majority of their games in March on the road starting with this West Coast trip. This at a time when every game is critical.
The Orlando Magic will be getting used to the team jet and hotel rooms for much of March.
Beginning Monday, the Magic play the next four games on the West Coast starting Monday night in Oakland against the vaunted Golden State Warriors. In March, Orlando will play 10 of its next 14 games on the road. The Magic will not play back-to-back home games again until March 26 and 29 against the Chicago Bulls and Brooklyn Nets.
That all seems far into the future. And it should be. Because with the Magic behind the eighth-seeded Bulls by four games, the Magic have to view almost every game as a must win. The margin for error if the Magic want to make the Playoffs is far too small not to consider it that way.
“It’s not more important than any other,” coach Scott Skiles said before Friday’s loss to the Phoenix Suns. “Each game that day is the most important game. It’s that simple. We have to win this game tonight. We have to go on the road and whoever we are facing, we have to win that game. That’s the position we put ourselves in. When you are coming from behind, you don’t have any room for error.”
That message was not received Friday when the Magic lost to the Suns 102-84. Orlando came out lifeless on defense and allowed Phoenix to push the team around. The easy narrative was to say the team overlooked the struggling Suns and assumed they could roll in and beat them.
That lesson should have been learned a long time ago this team simply cannot do that.
So that is an opportunity missed. The majority of the Magic’s game the rest of the year will be on the road. That schedule seems daunting.
Orlando will play at Golden State, at the Los Angeles Lakers, at Sacramento and at Portland in this weeklong road trip ending Saturday. The road gets no easier even with home games sprinkled in — the Cleveland Cavaliers make their second trip to Orlando later this month. And that comes as the lead in to another weeklong four-game road trip that starts in Toronto, heads to Boston, Detroit and Miami.
Later this month, the Magic will play all the top four teams in the Eastern Conference within a single week, essentially.
While no one on the team should be looking that far ahead, it does raise the necessity to win each game in front of them — particularly against weaker competition. Thus Friday’s game stung just a little bit more.
That has to be behind the team now. The Magic have to focus on winning this road trip before their quick trips home.
“This West Coast swing is going to be very big for us,” Aaron Gordon said. “If we can get a majority of the wins out here and get the momentum rolling and get us back on our way to making this Playoff push.”
Anything seems possible with this Orlando Magic team, to be perfectly frank. It is easy for the team to say they will go out and “win the trip,” so to speak, but doing it has been the biggest trick.
With March rolling up in the calendar, the Magic have accomplished their (soft) goal of playing meaningful games late into the season. At this point last year, Orlando was 19-42 and completely out of the Playoff race. The Magic have already surpassed last year’s win total and have improved by eight games.
That is no solace until the end of the season when trying to evaluate the year as a whole. Right now, the Magic are in the thick of things trying to make the Playoffs.
And since December this team has been anything but consistent.
“We’ll have to for sure play with much more energy and much more focus,” Nikola Vucevic said. “The road is much tougher. We have some tough games coming up. Every game on the road is tough. We’re going to have to be at our best to try to win those games. Our margin for error is slim. We have to make sure a game like doesn’t happen. When we play really well at a high level on both ends of the floor, we’re a pretty good team.”
The Magic have had success on the road, specifically going out West before. In their December road trip, the Magic went 3-2. Even last year, Orlando went 3-2 in their December trip to raise hopes (including that Golden State game where Stephen Curry hit a game-winning shot near the buzzer) and 1-3 in the January West Coast trip.
Vucevic said perhaps the team stepped up its focus on those earlier trips. Spending time off the court may help as well. It is always good to have a positive trip, he said, it can build confidence.
Winning on the road is very key for this team moving forward.
Of course, and more to the point, Orlando lost six straight games as it limped toward the end of the season last March. That habit is something the Magic are trying to avoid. Coach Scott Skiles has said he is guarding against the team falling back into those old habits as they play these meaningful games for the first time.
Most of these players have not been under this kind of pressure to win — and to do so in hostile environments — since their NCAA Tournament days. Really, only Mario Hezonja from his days playing for Barcelona in the constant pressure of league games, Euroleague and domestic cups, has experienced professional Playoff pressure.
He said the whole year is basically a playoff with all these overlapping competitions. The teams that win are the same. The ones that are mentally tough and serious in their approach to the games. That translates from Europe.
These games are important for the Magic. They all matter. And no game is more important than the next one as the pressure increases. This is a young team still improving and learning, but the main goal is still out there in reach — albeit still seemingly fading.
Next: Orlando Magic's search for consistency continues
“We’ve got to be on the same page, everybody and think the same,” Hezonja said. “Obviously we are getting better individually each day, but as a group, Playoffs.”
To reach that goal, the Magic will be doing so mostly on the road. That makes the task all the more difficult as the pressure in the season ramps up.