Before the season began, the Orlando Magic knew winning would be difficult and had plenty of questions to answer. This losing streak is raising them again.
Coach Steve Clifford took questions from the media in Sacramento after another blowout loss. As far as losses go, this one may have been as bad as any his team has suffered all year.
The Orlando Magic’s defensive attention to detail was never present from the beginning as the Sacramento Kings drove the lane and got easy shots throughout. Their offense was also completely inefficient. A mix of the team missing shots — outside of the reliable Nikola Vucevic — and 10 turnovers only made things seem even more daunting.
It may have been a close game after one quarter, but it felt like a matter of time before that margin would balloon.
Orlando never righted the ship, trailing by as much as 29 points in a 111-95 loss. And Clifford was left repeating similar mantras that followed many losses this year and scratching his head to figure out what more he could to ring something more out of this team.
“You have to play in a way that you play consistently. It starts with not beating yourself.”@orlandomagic coach Steve Clifford details his teams continued struggles on the road, lineup changes, and the play and leadership of @NikolaVucevic.#PureMagic #NBA pic.twitter.com/8EOjo9sHWU
— Bally Sports Florida & Bally Sports Sun (@BallySportsFL) January 8, 2019
Clifford and the Magic are asking themselves questions that are about something deep within this team.
Can this group win games and respond to tough times? Who will take and make shots for the group? How can the team space the floor without consistent shooters?
And, maybe more importantly, can any of these questions get answered this season or internally or does the team need to make changes externally?
In some respects, some of this is not surprising. Before the season began there was little optimism the Magic would be a consistent offensive team. They had a major lack of shooting with Evan Fournier, Terrence Ross and D.J. Augustin as the only reliably consistent shooters available.
It was also a team with some major deficiencies at point guard and a lot of questionable depth. The team was never going to be world beaters.
This is why Clifford often rightly diagnosed the team’s pathway to winning was fairly narrow. They had to be meticulous with their preparation and attentive to the details of their gameplan to have a chance. There would be no easy wins or gimme wins. The times the Magic could simply sleepwalk through a game would be virtually nil.
The team has proven through the first half of the season that when it plays with this attention to detail — this “organization” — they can beat anyone. But if they do not play with that intensity, they are as likely to get blown out by anyone.
It is a narrow path to victory indeed. One the team has tread carefully through early season struggles and some strong run of play.
The Eastern Conference has been forgiving enough for the team to sit at 17-23 and two games out of the final Playoff spot. It is hardly time to declare the season lost and pack it in for ping pong balls. But this losing streak has left plenty uneasy with the wide margins of defeat.
It is true the team has not always adhered to these principals. Clifford has had to take the postgame dais and publicly reprimand the team’s effort and approach, trying to raise the expectations and narrative of this team after six years out of the Playoffs.
This latest losing streak feels different. It has raised a slew of new questions. Or perhaps brought the original questions the team always struggled to answer to the fore.
After the team’s 11th loss in the last 16 games and third in a row, Clifford was again left scratching his head as he searches for the right combination.
For the third straight game, the team went flat-out cold from the floor — only this time without the benefit of building a 15-point lead in the first half as a cushion. The team struggled to move the ball and generate easy shots. Even with uncharacteristically high free throw attempts, the offense slowed to a crawl with little ball movement and a ton of forced motion and movement.
The defense did not much better. The physicality and precise play that marks the team’s strongest efforts seemed to betray them. Orlando was unable to keep ball handlers from getting downhill, warping things in the paint and opening things up on the perimeter.
The Magic’s starting unit has helped the team survive slow starts before. It is largely a group that works. But without much depth, Clifford has taken to tinkering with the rotation and searching for a group that might work. He has not found that answer yet.
It is easy to say the Magic should go with a new starting lineup to fix the team’s issues. But what does that do to an already depleted bench group? The real question is not whether to change the starting lineup, but how best to jumble the rotation to create a lineup combination that is effective?
Far too often, the bench struggles to maintain whatever momentum they or the starters create and the starters come in scrambling to get it back. Too often in this stretch, they have failed to do so.
What the Magic need is not hard to figure.
Orlando has always needed to improve its point guard play — especially off the bench where the team is currently operating without a natural point guard — and to find more scoring and shooting. These were obvious at the beginning of the season and have become even more obvious as the season progresses.
The biggest thing standing in the Magic’s way was the depth on the roster. None of that has changed from the start of the year. Orlando is still rebuilding and still needs to make a major roster change.
Increasingly though it seems the team’s ultimate answer to these questions cannot come from anything Clifford does internally. Orlando has to make a move in the trade market one way or the other — to push toward the Playoffs or set things up for the next phase of the rebuild.
What Jeff Weltman and John Hammond want to do likely gets determined as the team plays out the next few weeks. Then the noise will really begin to get louder.
Until then, Clifford is left to make the best with what he has before him. He has raised the expectations enough to believe this is enough to make noise in the Eastern Conference. It is up to them to refocus and turn things around, finding a way to crack a league that has started to slow this team down.
Clifford is right too that the team’s cold shooting will not last. There are several key players who are shooting well below their mean at the same time right now. And just like the start of the season when the Magic struggled to shoot, they will find their way out of it again and things will begin to feel more normal.
If answering these questions does not feel urgent, it is because it largely is not. The team is in a down stretch during an 82-game season. The more immediate question is how do they respond and recover.
But these questions do not go away. They are central to the team and the path it walks.
And right now, those answers seem difficult to attain.