Practice with passion
Vogel shows fiery side in team’s first workout
Early Tuesday afternoon, Frank Vogel ended his first practice as the Orlando Magic’s coach with a conditioning drill. He told his players to sprint the length of the court, make two passes along the way and finish with a layup.
He informed players they had to convert a total of 82 layups in two minutes.
The scoreboard tracked each layup while the clock ticked down.
But after 20 seconds, Vogel blew his whistle and stopped the drill.
“We’re not jogging through this drill!” Vogel yelled, his decibel level rising with each word. “We’re not jogging when we play offensive basketball! Everybody doing this drill has another gear! We need to play harder than every team we play!”
Vogel reset the clock to two minutes. He told his players to try again.
Perhaps no sequence during two practices Tuesday revealed more about Vogel. All summer long, Magic players had seen Vogel’s sunny side; he took a genuine interest in their life stories, their families and their basketball careers, and the players appreciated it. But when he interrupted and restarted the conditioning drill, he showed another facet to his coaching personality: a tough, demanding side.
“It was good that you see that fire coming out of him,” center Bismack Biyombo said later.
The Magic finished just short of the required 82 layups on their second attempt.
“You see we’ve got work to do,” Vogel said to his players. “Catch your breaths. We’re not done. We’re not done.”
He put one minute on the clock — one minute to make 41 layups. The team made 44. “These guys all think they’re
Continued from Page C1 running hard, and they really do have another gear,” Vogel said afterward. “And you’ve got to challenge them to find that gear. That’s the speed that we want to play at. We don’t want to be a jog-it-up team.”
Lacking a superstar scorer, Magic coaches know they need to push the ball upcourt whenever possible to generate baskets. Vogel hoped the conditioning drill would help hammer home the message.
Vogel met with his players Monday night and again before Tuesday morning’s practice to explain his expectations and start installing his X’s-andO’s schemes. Several members of the Magic said he focused on defense, on playing unselfishly and on communicating well on the court.
During their morning workout, the Magic looked like a typical team on its first day of training camp. Turnovers, sloppiness and fatigue popped up often.
“Not every time is going to be perfect,” big man Serge Ibaka said. “But we need somebody like him who’s going to push us.”
The first practice brought some unwelcome news. Starting point guard Elfrid Payton strained his left hip flexor and had to sit out the final 30 to 40 minutes of practice. He watched from the sidelines as his teammates completed their conditioning drills.
Still, Tuesday started a new chapter of Vogel’s coaching career: his first official practices as the Magic’s coach after a 5½-year stint as the Indiana Pacers’ head coach. His new players think he will bring a similar style of play to Orlando.
“His teams in Indiana were very physical,” swingman Evan Fournier said. “He wants to play the same way here.”
Like the rest of his teammates, Fournier regarded Vogel’s flare-up at the end of practice as a positive.
“It’s a great feeling,” Fournier said. “You want your coach to push you.”
Vogel ended the day’s first practice after the Magic Vogel’s made their 44 layups in one minute.
The players and coaches huddled at midcourt.
A short while later, some players practiced their free throws. As rookie center Stephen Zimmerman started to raise the ball upward, his eyes focused on the basket 15 feet away, Vogel snuck behind him and knocked the ball out of Zimmerman’s hands.
A smile crossed face.
Zimmerman smiled, too. jrobbins@ orlandosentinel.com