Orlando Magic taking steps toward winning culture, but still suffer scars of past

The Orlando Magic are slowly taking steps toward winning and building a firm foundation. They must still push through the scars of their past.

The Orlando Magic are slowly taking steps toward winning and building a firm foundation. They must still push through the scars of their past.

A few possessions earlier, the Magic seemed full of confidence. They were the team staring down a deficit and refusing to blink. They were the team that had gone 26-8 run in six minutes to erase an 18-point deficit.

Mario Hezonja was looking like fifth-overall-pick Hezonja, draining 3-pointers and leading the team back on a charge. It was clear what the players wanted in this game. They were not going to sit by and let this one pass them by.

So long as there was some time on the clock, they were going to find a way to stay in it.

Coach Frank Vogel lauded his team’s fight after the game. He said, as he has said after several games in this stretch of moderate success, the team is doing the right things and giving themselves more and more chances to win. They were just scratching and clawing for the results to come with that effort.

The Magic are a different team right now. Everything seems a bit brighter around them at the moment. That is what winning can do.

The Magic have passed the basic tests — they are fighting every night for wins. They are even passing the intermediate tests — they are giving themselves a chance to win nearly every night now and sometimes taking those wins. Players are growing and growing in confidence.

Orlando is trying to do something with the final 20-plus games of its season. Vogel said last year that he believes in karma and promised that he would play his best players in games that still had meaning for at least one of the teams.

Really though this is an exercise in building an internal expectation for his team. This is not some ploy “for the good of the game.” This is about building the habits it will take when the Magic are in a position to turn things around.

That is all the team is trying to do right now. The Magic want to lay a foundation for their ultimate success. They want to begin building toward that feeling of winning and understanding the work it takes to win on a nightly basis. Orlando wants players to expect wins internally.

That is the ultimate goal for the team. The baseline to start and grow from.

It remains a long road to get there. Five years of constant losing have left scars.

Players even admit they feel the pangs of past pains in some moments. Even at 8-4, Evan Fournier was mentioning the team’s collapse in 2016 when a poor January derailed a stellar 19-13 start.

The memories of those losses still remain. And they can infect the team with doubt.

The next step to moving on and being able to move up is putting those memories away. And burying them.

The Magic are not there yet.

Orlando still gets tight late in games and the team’s late-game gaffes are still pain-inducing. The Orlando Magic suffered another one late against the Chicago Bulls, unable to maintain the momentum that led to their come-from-behind effort. Execution matters most late in games and the Magic did not have it.

They did not have it most with the game tied at 101 with 15 seconds left. Orlando was set to inbound the ball with the final possession of the game. The Magic should have had the last shot and the last chance to win the game.

Instead, the team seemed panic and unable to break free. Their cuts were not sharp. Their screens were not clear. Everyone was crowding. Jonathon Simmons tried to rush the ball to Shelvin Mack and he could not catch it cleanly.

Zach LaVine stepped in front to take the loose ball and run the ball back for a breakaway dunk. The Magic were down two now and ultimately 105-101 losers again.

The Magic have lost games before thanks to poor inbounds plays and inbounds passes. These silly plays that seem to defy logic. The turnover on the basic act of putting the ball in play has become a running joke for this team in the last five years.

It cost them again. The chance to further their confidence and deepen the roots of the foundation they are building of late.

It was a mishap that seems to overshadow everything else. Only because it feels so familiar and so disappointing. It was a self-inflicted wound so basic that it reminds of all the basic mistakes the team has made in the past.

The kind of soul-crushing losses that have buried the team. Orlando has lost these kinds of games before. And then lost the next one, letting the loss defeat them again. Defeat builds upon itself.

That response is the question for this team. It is not how you get knocked down, but how you get back up. That is where the Magic have struggled most in the last five years.

Orlando Magic

It is in letting an 18-point deficit grow to 30. It is letting one thing go wrong and allowing it to turn into five.

This team has shown signs that things are different. That its response will be different.

Down by 18 points in the fourth quarter in a game where the team shot 44.0 percent and seemingly worse to that point, Orlando did not fold. It erased the deficit within six minutes. The team never had that fight in the last few years.

The Magic still have a lot of learning to do to learn how to win consistently. The team is trying to take baby steps to get there in this season.

There are steps the team still has to take. But the foundations for a future of success are getting laid down. And laid down successfully. The Magic’s recent run is not insignificant for a team that had fallen so far. It is a little sign of hope.

The Magic are starting to build themselves back up and develop the winning habits.

But bad habits die hard. Orlando dug itself a hole with a lethargic offensive effort. Those lethargic efforts have popped up from time to time. And the inbounds turnover was emblematic of the problems of the past.

Getting to that moment is emblematic of the hope for the future. Whatever happens with the team in the offseason and how the Magic change things, the lessons and the habits built now will play a role in the team’s overall development. The change has to happen now.

It starts with the Magic’s willingness to continue to fight. The kind of fight they showed to get back and survive Monday’s game.

Next: Grades: Chicago Bulls 105, Orlando Magic 101

Whether the Magic have truly learned any lessons and truly begun building that foundation comes Wednesday. The response to kicking the game away at the end will be more telling.