Magic shoot for blue-collar look
Finding, keeping identity will serve team well
Almost every member of the Orlando Magic faced the same question during their annual media day Monday at Amway Center. What do you expect your team’s identity to be this season?
No one offered a clearer answer than fifth-year forward Aaron Gordon.
“We’re going to be tough every single game,” Gordon responded. “We’re going to bring it every single game. There will be no nights off. We’re going to give no team no passes. When they see that they have Orlando on the schedule, they know they’re going to have a fight.”
Gordon’s words echo the vision new coach Steve Clifford has for the Magic. Simply put, Clifford wants Orlando to be a team its opponents dread playing.
If these Magic succeed — if they ultimately embody a bluecollar, tough-as-nails mentality — it would be the first time they’ve developed a stable identity of any kind since the Dwight Howard era’s glory days. Ever since 2012, the Magic haven’t stuck to one specific style of play, despite their best intentions. The constant philosophical shifts has been one of the team’s most significant problems.
Take Frank Vogel’s two-year
tenure, for instance. During Vogel’s first season, the Magic attempted to employ a smash-mouth style that featured two big men playing simultaneously, but that experiment failed miserably, prompting the trade of power forward Serge Ibaka. Last season, Vogel modernized the team’s approach on offense and urged his players to push the pace whenever they could.
Vogel’s successor is preaching smart, balanced basketball.
“We’ll open up with Miami 23 days from now,” Clifford said. “We’ll have 15 practices, five exhibitions, five shoot-arounds, and that’s enough time to start to make steps and get everybody on the proverbial same page. So that’s what we’ll try to do.”
Evan Fournier, Nikola Vucevic and Gordon have seen changes in Orlando before. They have played for four head coaches during their Magic tenures: Jacque Vaughn, interim coach James Borrego, Scott Skiles and Vogel. The revolving door at coach, as well as the constant turnover on the roster, made it difficult to coalesce on a single identity.
So what will the Magic need to do to get back on the right track?
To hear Fournier tell it, players need to finally follow through on what they say they must do. For example, instead of saying they’re going to play defense, they need to actually take pride in containing the basketball and work together. Instead of promising they’re going to share the ball on offense, they need to do what their coach asks: find the open man.
“It’s just those things we keep saying,” Fournier said. “But they kind of lose value because we say it every day: ‘Hey, you have to work hard. You’ve got to have chemistry. You’ve got to be together.’ We keep saying those things, but you hear them so much, you kind of lose sight of what they really are. It has to happen. It just has to happen. It’s that simple.”
After many of the Magic’s 57 losses last season, Vucevic would stand by his locker and say the team needed to do what it had said it was going to do: play together on both ends of the floor.
The failure to do so, he often said, prevented the team from developing a coherent identity.
“The only way we get there,” Vucevic said Monday, “is to work on it every day. But I think obviously with Coach Cliff he’s big on the defensive end. Obviously, that’s something that we do need to improve on compared to the last couple of years. So that’s going to be our main thing: a team that plays hard and that plays together. I think that’s really the team that we have to be.”