By John DentonOct. 29, 2015
ORLANDO – Mario Hezonja drilled the first two 3-point shots of his NBA career and a third clutch three gave the Orlando Magic a promising lead with 2:19 to play on Wednesday night.
Aaron Gordon jumped out of the gym, dunked over foes twice and managed to stay injury free until he was poked in the eye. And Elfrid Payton, another second-year player who spent most of his offseason working to improve his game, drilled four jump shots during the game.
Also, Orlando’s defense, one that has undergone a massive overhaul over the past six weeks under new coach Scott Skiles and one that showed major improvements in the preseason, limited the high-powered Washington Wizards to 39.3 percent shooting and a mere 88 points.
The problem, however, was that none of it was good enough for an Orlando team that had its hopes crushed by late-game lapses on both ends of the floor. The Magic saw a five-point lead wither away when they missed their final five shots, fumbled the ball away once and allowed Washington to score the game’s final six points in an 88-87 defeat.
All of those positives from the first 46 minutes – many of them provided by Hezonja, Gordon, Payton and Orlando’s defense – were for naught because of a shoddy final 120 seconds.
“Plain and simple, we just have to be better,” said Magic shooting guard Victor Oladipo, who had 17 points and 11 rebounds but he struggled through a seven-of-20 shooting night. “It wasn’t good enough to win so we can’t (be satisfied). We’ve got to find a way to win. We’ve got to be better.”
The mission now for the Magic (0-1) is to be better against Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and the stacked Oklahoma City Thunder (1-0) on Friday night. The Magic will be back at the Amway Center, the site of Wednesday night’s meltdown in the final minutes. Orlando knows full well that if it is going to make the strides that it wants this season it has to better figure out how to close out games, starting on Friday night.
“That’s the next step for us and we knew that coming into the season,” said Payton, referring to the need to be better in crunch time. “It’s just something that we’ve got to continue to work at.”
Fourth-quarter failures can happen to even the best of teams, and that was the case with the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday against Oklahoma City. The Spurs took a four-point lead into the fourth quarter and led by as much as seven in the final period before OKC rallied back. Durant, who made just six of 19 shots in his first game back after missing much of last season with a foot injury, had a go-ahead 3-pointer with 4 minutes to play off a feed from Westbrook (33 points and 10 assists). Durant also had two clutch free throws with 11.5 seconds remaining to cap OKC’s 33-23 fourth quarter surge against the veteran-laden Spurs.
Tobias Harris, who scored 15 points but had his potential game-winning layup rim out in the final seconds, knows that Orlando will need to play solid for 48 minutes to beat a powerful Oklahoma City squad.
“As we watched the film (from Wednesday’s game) there were a lot of plays where we didn’t have a lot of energy and didn’t push ourselves,” Harris said. “To be a good team and to win a lot of games in those situations we have to have a lot of energy. The last three minutes, that’s when we’ve got to have the most energy.”
On Thursday, the Magic were still trying to pick up the pieces from a fourth quarter that soured their chances of winning the first game of the Skiles coaching era. The veteran coach, who was hired by the Magic in late May to instill mental and physical toughness in the youthful roster, was irked at how the Magic changed their style of play in the fourth quarter – something that led to Orlando squandering an eight-point lead with 8 minutes to play and the five-point edge in the final 2 minutes. Down the stretch, the Magic again came unglued offensively and defensively and had to stomach another result where a near sure-fire victory slipped through their hands.
“It wasn’t so much about late game as it was mid-fourth quarter when we started to come unhinged a little bit,” Skiles said. “At that point, it’s hard to get it back sometimes. But we’re still up five with 2 minutes to go and we needed a stop-and-score and we didn’t get either.
“We don’t have the type of team like some teams or many teams where they don’t have to run any plays and they just give it to a guy and he goes and gets you a good shot. We have to rely on each other and our movement,” Skiles continued. “But we got away from that a little bit.”
All of the excitement brought by Hezonja (11 points and three 3-pointers), Gordon (12 points and seven rebounds) and Payton (11 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists) was undone by some glaring offensive deficiencies. The Magic shot just 37 percent in the game, 28.6 percent in the second half and 26.9 percent in the fourth quarter. Magnifying those woes, the Magic made just five of 26 tries from beyond the 3-point line with Oladipo (1 of 8), Evan Fournier (0 of 3) and Harris (0 of 3) struggling the most. Factor in that the Magic – last in the NBA last season in free throw attempts and free throw makes – attempted fewer free throws (12) than Washington made (15) and it was a recipe for disaster.
Skiles has said repeatedly that the Magic must either get to the line more or foul less in order to narrow the free throw discrepancy. Furthering problems that have been around for the better part of three-plus seasons, Orlando was outscored by 15-8 at the free throw line and by six points at the 3-point arc.
“We had a ton of opportunities to get fouled, but we have a tendency to drive to the rim and kind of throw up things that have no chance of going in. We’re not getting contact and it’s not a high percentage shot,” Skiles said. “You have to be very aggressive and drive the ball hard. We just lost our pace that we were playing at and when it got tight we started walking the ball up the floor and we were slow getting into our stuff. … We have to get into our stuff quicker so we have time to explore different options. We just didn’t do that well enough.”
Learning to close out foes late in close games is a problem that has been around Orlando much longer than its first-year coach has been. Last season, the Magic dropped 15 games in which they took a lead into the fourth quarter and Wednesday was another case of that as they led 67-65 going into the final period. Also, the Magic were just 12-12 in games decided by 1-to-5 points and 9-20 in games decided by 6-to-10 points last season.
Fully aware that it’s the outcomes in close games that often decide the elite teams from the not-so-good ones, the Magic know that getting over the hump in fourth quarters will be a key factor this season. As a frustrated, yet resolute Oladipo stressed, little matters what the Magic did in the first 46 minutes of the game if they don’t close out the final two minutes and find a way to win.
“A lot of the games in our league do come down to the last six, four, three or two minutes and you’ve got to be prepared and be able to execute in those stretches,” Oladipo said. “There are 82 games (in a NBA season) so there are going to be situations where we’re put in the same situation as we were in last night and we’ve got to do better.”
