Scott Skiles was hired to immediately help the Orlando Magic emerge from the depths of rebuilding. That’s something the previous coaching regime couldn’t accomplish, and the surface-level takeaway from the season’s early going doesn’t suggest anything different from this one.
After the Magic lost yet another hard-fought game earlier on Wednesday, Skiles was asked “how to build” off his young team taking a title contender like the Houston Rockets down to the wire.
“Well,” he told the Orlando Sentinel, “I’m curious as to how much the previous coach answered that same question in three years.”
Moral victories, basically, aren’t good enough for the Magic anymore. Age and experience be damned, this team wants to win right now – which makes its remarkable run of close games both immensely frustrating and wildly encouraging.
Upon beating the previously undefeated Toronto Raptors by a score of 92-87 Friday night, Orlando registered its sixth consecutive game to open 2015-16 that was within five points in its final five minutes. The Magic are the league’s only team to play each of their games in crunch time, and have notched 37 such minutes in total – nine more than the Oklahoma City Thunder’s mark, which ranks second most in the NBA.
Orlando lost to the Washington Wizards on John Wall’s game-winner in the final 15 seconds. It couldn’t get past the Thunder despite two overtimes and crazy clutch shot-making from Victor Oladipo. The late-game surge of Skiles’ team wasn’t enough to beat the Chicago Bulls. The Magic held off the the winless New Orleans Pelicans on the road for their first win of the year. Lady Luck betrayed them again just one night later, though, when the blue and black lost to the Houston Rockets in overtime.
This team, believe it or not, is a few more fortunate bounces away from being the talk of the league. Just imagine how much attention Orlando would be receiving if Wall’s layup was off the mark, Russell Westbrook didn’t make a 40-foot, game-tying bank shot, or had the Rockets missed just one additional attempt in the fourth quarter.
But the difference between winning and losing is razor thin, and the Magic haven’t quite learned how to perform to their peak when it matters most. Orlando is shooting just 30 percent from the field and sports a dismal 85.7 offensive rating in clutch situations this season, owing to its -13.4 overall net rating. While those struggles certainly speak to youth and inexperience, they also indicate the limitations of Skiles’ still-evolving roster.
Aaron Gordon is the Magic’s most versatile defender, but can he really be on the floor when points come at an extra premium down the stretch? The opposite’s true of Nikola Vucevic. Both Washington and Oklahoma City hurt the Magic by putting the plodding seven-footer in ball-screens late, but they need his scoring punch on the other end of the floor.
Balancing strengths and weaknesses of individual players and five-man units is a chore for any first-year coach, let alone one whose team is on the precipice of building for the future and winning for the present. And that, of course, has been made especially difficult for Skiles due to his team’s unsustainable run of close games.
But don’t look at Orlando’s record or its oft-confounding substitution patterns as evidence of progress. The process looms larger than results no matter what Skiles and the front office are preaching, and that’s why the Magic’s start to 2015-16 is more promising than anything else. Sooner or later, the win-loss column seems bound to show it, too.
(Via Orlando Sentinel)
