The Magic’s overtime loss Friday night to the Hornets will make a tough road ahead even tougher.
Orlando players’ confidence has reached another low point after falling to Charlotte
As poorly as the Orlando Magic have played this month, there was no precedent for what happened Friday night. The Magic took an 18-point lead over the Charlotte Hornets with 10:30 to go in the fourth quarter but still lost the game 120-116 in overtime.
The Magic’s confidence had reached a low point before they faced the Hornets, but their selfesteem must be even lower now.
They’ve lost nine of their last 10 games, and perhaps none of those defeats stung as badly as the loss to the Hornets.
“Our character is going to be built during this time,” guard Victor Oladipo said. “What kind of players, what kind of men are we? [That] is the question. We’ve got to question each other and look in the mirror and question ourselves and realize that we’ve got to step up and ask ourselves: Are we really going to fold right now? Or are we going to step up and change this around?”
Reversing course will be difficult to do.
When the Magic move the ball from side-to-side, their offense can be effective, as their first three quarters against the Hornets showed.
But when the Magic abandon
their ball movement, their offense sputters, as it did during the fourth quarter against the Hornets. In that period, the Magic went 5 for 19 from the field and turned the ball over nine times.
“I just don’t believe we’re trusting each other as well as we need to be,” forward Aaron Gordon said. “I don’t know whether it’s deliberately or if we’re just missing the open man sometimes, and we’ve got to get back to passing to the open man. Regardless if we think it’s the right play or not, it’s the right play.”
Part of the issue during Friday’s fourth quarter and overtime clearly was that the Magic sensed the game slipping away from them and, as Oladipo noted, the team “panicked in a sense.”
“The most frustrating thing for me is just how when things are going bad how negative we get,” Oladipo said.
When asked what he meant by “negative,” Oladipo answered, “When things get kind of shaky and we start missing shots and they start making shots and making tough shots, we’ve just got to continue to keep pressing forward, keep pressing forward, keep pressing forward and not look back and not hang our heads down or throw a pity party.”
The road ahead will become more difficult.
Today, the team will leave town to begin a difficult three-game road trip against the Memphis Griz- zlies, Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics.
The Magic haven’t won in Memphis since Jan. 23, 2008. They will play in Milwaukee on the second night of a back-to-back. And they also haven’t won a regular-season game in Boston since Feb. 7, 2010.
After the road trip concludes Friday night in Boston, the Magic will host the Celtics a week from today.
And then the schedule will really toughen. Road games in San Antonio and Oklahoma City will be followed by home games against the Los Angeles Clippers and Atlanta Hawks, followed by a road game in Atlanta. After that, the Magic will host the Spurs before the All-Star Break mercifully begins.
The loss to the Hornets didn’t generate confi- dence.
“It really [stinks],” center Nik Vucevic said. “After you get up 16, 18 in the fourth and you have a nice lead, all you’ve got to do is finish the game. To let it slip away, it hurts. It [stinks]. We could’ve really used this one to turn things around. But we didn’t. We didn’t finish the game the right way. So we’ve just got to find a way the next game.”