After their surprising start this season, the Magic now find themselves at a crossroad.
Reeling Magic face crossroads to season
Frank Vogel kept his postgame remarks to the Orlando Magic concise after the Utah Jazz humiliated them 125-85 Saturday night at home.
The way they lost, he said, was “unacceptable.”
And, he said to them, everyone in the locker room, including himself, will be judged by how they respond to their 40-point defeat.
“We’ll see how we respond to this game,” Vogel told reporters later. “I’m less concerned about what happened in this game and more concerned about how we’ll respond to it.”
After a surprising start to their season, the Magic already have reached a potential crossroads. They have lost their last four games. The first three defeats — road losses to the Denver
Nuggets, Golden State Warriors and Portland Trail Blazers — were worrisome but understandable.
But how the Magic lost Saturday to the Jazz was inexplicable. Orlando never led and trailed by as many as 46 points even though Utah has been depleted by injuries and was playing on the second night of a back-to-back.
“No one played well,” Arron Afflalo said. “I didn’t play well. I don’t feel anybody should feel like they played well when you lose like that at home. But our whole mentality as a group has to change into wanting your teammate to be better, enjoying watching your teammate be successful, because that’s the energy we need with the team that we have assembled. We’re very talented, but we need each other.”
When the Magic opened the season 6-2, they thrived primarily by sharing the ball on offense, by turning down OK shots to get better shots for teammates. And through it all, they showed some backbone, thwarting a Miami Heat rally in the fourth quarter on opening night and notching road victories on the second nights of backto-backs over the Cleveland Cavaliers and New Orleans Pelicans. The Magic seemed to have a toughness that had been lacking last season.
On Saturday, however, the Magic flat-out failed to move the basketball and played soft.
“I feel the same way you all feel, like, ‘What am I watching?’ ” point guard D.J. Augustin told reporters. “Just watching that game, watching us out there and being out there, [I feel] the same way, like, ‘What’s going on?’
“Maybe it’s something we need to talk about as a team. Maybe we need to get together and talk about that. I know we’re going to watch film on Monday.”
The team needs to correct its mentality soon.
Tonight, they’ll host the Indiana Pacers. After that, they’ll return to the road for a four-game trip to face the Minnesota Timberwolves, Boston Celtics, Philadelphia 76ers and Pacers. After that, they’ll play at home against the Oklahoma City Thunder and the NBA champion Warriors.
The season could spiral out of control, like the 2015-16 season deteriorated in January 2016 and just like last season unraveled this past January.
“Monday is a must-win for this group,” said point guard Elfrid Payton, who was on the Magic’s 2015-16 and 2016-17 teams. “Obviously, it’s still early. We still have time to get better. But internally I feel like we’ve got to show some fight.”
Last season, Vogel’s first season as the Magic’s coach, the team showed too little fight. They lost eight games by margins of 20-29 points and lost eight additional games by at least 30 points.
This season, the Magic had seemed to turn a corner — until Saturday night.
“I think we lost what made us good at the beginning of the season: playing together, having fun out there, enjoying the game,” center Nikola Vucevic said. “Over-dribbling, over-trying to get stuff instead of just playing simple basketball, like we did earlier in the year, it just affects us little by little. It just takes away from our energy. It’s like it’s taking little bites [out of us]. By the end of the game, there was no energy left.”
Magic players said they can regain traction if, and only if, they return to playing like they did in their first eight games.
“You’ve got to look at why you missed the shots,” swingman Evan Fournier said. “I thought the ball movement and the body movement was nonexistent tonight. [It was] very frustrating, obviously, because we know what we are capable of in that aspect. We had success before. So we have to make sure we don’t get away from it.”
Last season’s Magic never overcame adversity, at least not consistently.
Can this year’s team overcome adversity?
Even Vogel, who is perpetually optimistic, left the answer to that question open-ended after the loss to the Jazz.
“We’ll see if it’s going to be different,” he said. “We’ll see. I challenged our guys to see how we respond to this.”