Orlando Magic Playbook: Aaron Gordon’s defense on Kawhi Leonard wasn’t enough

Closing his space

As a team, the Orlando Magic did little to close up Leonard’s space on offense, as defender distance was roughly the same for Kawhi Leonard in the regular season as it was against Orlando in the first round.

Leonard also took a larger portion of his shots closer to the basket (36 percent vs. 45.6 percent). In other words, the Magic did little to make Leonard uncomfortable or consistently force him into offensive situations with which he was uncomfortable.

Aaron Gordon admitted this was something he would have to work on after Leonard got going in Game 1. He said he needed to do a better job being more physical with Leonard to push him off his spot.

This proved to be key time and time again as Leonard used that little bit of separation to get his shot off. He had an incredible series, but Orlando at least opened the door.

Here is a simple baseline isolation play from Game 1, Leonard versus Gordon. Leonard quite easily gets to his spot in the lane and draws an and-one. The help did not come and Gordon was left on Board Man’s Island.

In this play from Game 2, Gordon does a good job of initially denying Leonard’s first shot choice. But Leonard gets the ball back, does a little shimmy move, and gets enough space to connect from about 17 feet out.

Gordon is good but a move like that cannot create that much space for the Magic to slow a player like Leonard down.

This clip from Game 2 shows a problem that kept coming up for Gordon: the inability to fight through or around screens.

Here, Marc Gasol sets the (what is likely moving) screen and Aaron Gordon is simply left behind the play. By the time he can recover, Leonard is practically already at the basket.

Orlando ended up using a strategy of having Nikola Vucevic shadow Kawhi Leonard coming off screens. That worked to some extent to get Leonard moving the ball, but he could still beat that defense with his pull up jumper and sometimes he would just bull his way through.

And with the Magic’s high turnover rate in the series — 16.3 percent in the Playoffs compared to 13.3 percent (sixth in the league) in the regular season — helped get Leonard and the Raptors plenty of points before the Magic could set up their defense.

It is worth noting that on average, Leonard completed his decimation of Orlando quickly, too.

He averaged only 6.1 4th quarter minutes against the Orlando Magic, his lowest in the Playoffs since the 2014 NBA Finals, where the San Antonio Spurs’ average margin of victory in the five-game series against the Big Three Miami Heat was 18 points, and the first round in 2012, Leonard’s rookie year and very first Playoff series.