ORLANDO -- Despite being heavily undermanned and forced to play several players out of position to compensate, the Orlando Magic have fought hard and remained competitive in their two games since the All-Star break.
After going toe-to-toe with the Heat in Miami and holding a double-digit lead against the Spurs in San Antonio, turnovers proved to be too costly for an Orlando squad, whose margin of error is currently extremely thin.
The Magic (13-25) will need to minimize those mistakes on Sunday if they hope to snap a seven-game losing skid and get revenge on their Sunshine State rival, the Heat (20-18), who’ve won nine of their last 10 outings. Tip-off is at 7 p.m. ET at Amway Center.
“When you have a lot of turnovers, it’s always difficult,” Magic All-Star center Nikola Vucevic explained. “Part of it (has been) when you have nine guys available, six big men, in today’s NBA it’s difficult to play that way.”
Even more so than it has all season, Orlando has relied heavily on Vucevic while immensely shorthanded. They’ve operated much of their offense through the valuable big man and he’s done his best to keep the team in games. The two-time All-Star is averaging 25.0 points and 13.0 rebounds since the break while shooting 57.9 percent from the floor.
“We had stretches (against the Spurs) where we’re playing through him every possession, on the perimeter as a playmaker (and) in the post,” Magic Head Coach Steve Clifford said. “You could see (against San Antonio) similar (to our game against Miami), sometimes before he gets the ball, he’s got three guys on him and when he does, what young players can learn from, he makes the right play. That’s why he’s such a good player.”
With the injuries, players like Chuma Okeke have been forced to play out of position. While Orlando intended to bring the rookie forward along at a slower pace, give him a defined role, and cultivate his confidence and success, a shortage of backcourt and perimeter players have resulted in him moving positions and taking on even more responsibility.
“It’s sped up,” said Okeke, who made his first career NBA start on Friday. “Everything is just a learning experience. You’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to learn from those mistakes and that’s how you get better. I feel like I’m getting better. I’ve just got to keep on playing hard and make my shots.”
INJURY UPDATE: Unfortunately for Orlando, help is not necessarily on the way.
Terrence Ross (sore left knee) is questionable for the matchup, while Cole Anthony (non-displaced fracture, right rib), James Ennis III (sore left calf), Evan Fournier (strained left groin), Markelle Fultz (torn ACL, left knee), Aaron Gordon (left ankle injury management) and Jonathan Isaac (left knee rehabilitation) are out. Karim Mane has rejoined the team after his two-way assignment with the G League champions, the Lakeland Magic.
For the Heat, Gabe Vincent (right knee soreness) is probable, while Bam Adebayo (left knee tendinitis), Avery Bradley (right calf strain), and Meyers Leonard (league suspension) are out.
KEY STAT: Through 38 games this season, the Magic have used a whopping 17 different starting lineups. Vucevic is the only player who has been in all of them.
QUOTES TO NOTE: “It’s hard when you come to the arena and you prepare, and you see that we’re so shorthanded that we’re just so unbalanced. It’s hard. But once the game starts, you go out there play and enjoy it. It’s our job and we have to do the best that we can. Once you get on the court, I don’t think about anything. Just try to go out there and have fun, enjoy, play the best that I can and try to help the team win. It’s just unfortunate. It seems like a lot of games, we start off well, we’re right there, and teams switch it up a little bit, pressure us, and they do things where it’s difficult to play when you don’t have enough guards. That’s just reality of it right now. … It is what it is. We have to keep fighting, keep staying with it, and hope that we get some guys back soon enough.” – Vucevic on the challenges of remaining positive during this current stretch.
“He is a really good player and All-Star for a reason. They have a bunch of guys out and they are kind of running everything through him. It is tough. You have to try to contain him and do what you can. It needs to be a group effort. You can’t guard someone like that with one person.” – Miami’s Kelly Olynyk on defending Vucevic.
RIVALS REPORT: In this edition of our Rivals Report series, we’re joined by special guest, Heat.com beat writer Couper Moorhead, who’s covered the team for the past 10 seasons. He was kind enough to take the time both today and prior to the last meeting to answer a few questions about the Heat.
Savage: “What were some of your biggest takeaways from the Heat’s game against the Magic in Miami on Thursday?”
Moorhead: “Number one was Jimmy Butler being Jimmy Butler. He was pretty much the difference in that game. It wasn’t really a good-looking game aesthetically from either side, it was very much a first-game-back-from-break sort of thing. Everybody was grinding things out and then Jimmy Butler brought it home in the fourth quarter like he’s been doing for the last month or so. It was an All-Star level, bring-this-one-home kind of performance. Overall, it’s not really fun to talk about injuries, but you could tell just how much the Magic were missing a lot of their guys, including the playmakers even with Gordon back – he was on a minutes limit and they didn’t have Ross off the bench. So, you could see that they were treating Vucevic almost the same way they treated Trae Young just before the All-Star break when the Hawks had a bunch of their wings out and they also had limited ballhandling and playmaking. (They brought) double-teams, triple-teams, they’re feinting extra help, there’s always multiple eyes threatening to go at the other team’s primary guy, and Vucevic as a big man, it’s a little bit more unusual for that kind of coverage because you can’t really blitz him. Still, every time he wanted to touch the ball, there’s two, three, four guys thinking 'oh, we’ve got to go stop him. We’ve got to get the ball out of his hands.' And he still went eight-of-twelve in the first half for eighteen points. It was remarkable that he was still as efficient as he was with all that attention. Things started to turn in the second half, but really the game changed in the last five minutes. It was a close game and then the Heat went full-court press, dropping back into a zone and the Magic with limited ball handling and limited shooting on the floor at the same time, there’s not really much of a counter for that. Orlando’s offense slowed up and then Jimmy Butler, like we said, just took it home for them. That just seemed like the difference. We might see much of the same tonight. We’ll see if that Magic can cook up some sort of counter to that full-court press.”
Savage: “We saw the Heat take a major step forward going into the All-Star break. What were the keys to that surge for the Miami Heat?”
Moorhead: “Just having players available, really. It sounds like an easy excuse along those lines, but at the end of the day you need your starters to be on the court. Jimmy missed a lot of time, Goran Dragic missed a lot of time, Bam missed a couple games, (and) we had players in and out with health and safety protocols, like every team is dealing with, the Magic included. At the end of the day, even when we had a bit of a losing streak and we were six or seven games below five-hundred, I was looking at the profile of the team and the profile never really changed. They were getting the same kind of shots, the same shot difficulty. Everything was generally the same even as we were shifting through a pretty deep rotation at that point. So, it was pretty clear that things were going to turn at some point, you just need your best players on the floor sometimes for that to happen. Also, we were playing a lot of games that went into the last five minutes and they can be coin flips in one way or another – you still have to put the work in to win those games – but we had lost a bunch. Then, Jimmy Butler had an incredible February and we won a bunch of clutch games. It’s not a coincidence that the Heat getting back to five-hundred before the All-Star break also came on the back of them getting back to five-hundred in clutch games as well. Combination of just health, availability, getting somethings to go your way at the end of games, and now they look just about the same as they did last regular season at least.”
Savage: “This might be hard for a team that went to The Finals recently, but what’s one aspect of this Heat team that you think gets overlooked or that you think has a bigger impact than what people talk about?”
Moorhead: “You’re right, it’s hard to say anything is overlooked when a team makes a run to The Finals people start picking you apart pretty cleanly. (laughter) I’ll go back to the defensive versatility that I mentioned. The way they score, people understand that they move the ball, they run a lot of off-ball motion. Every time I listen to an opposing broadcast or national broadcast, people are giving them credit for that. But it’s on the defensive end where I think they built up a really nice repertoire that they can use. (Head Coach) Erik Spoelstra is excellent at tailoring game plans to his opponent. And a lot of times you’ll be watching, and it’ll feel like they’re executing at least a facsimile of a playoff plan in a regular season game where they probably didn’t even have a real practice or even a shootaround for. But Spo has used so many schemes over the years. They blitzed earlier in the decade. They played drop coverage, they switch, they’ve used kind of every pick-and-roll coverage imaginable that he and his staff are so comfortable now and they teach these guys to build up their defensive knowledge the longer they are with the team. So, they can go out any night and play any style. That doesn’t make them the best at any of those styles. There might be better switching teams, but the fact that you can switch comfortably and then the next possession drop back into a zone and then disguise that zone and maybe tweak one thing here or there – how high a guy is playing up on the weakside or something like that – I think that is incredibly useful. It obviously came in handy during the playoffs last season. They had to play a few different coverages there. As far as things that are maybe overlooked a bit, I think it’s the versatility there. You have to have the personnel and Andre Iguodala off the bench makes a huge difference as far as unlocking a lot of those defensive coverages. It’s kind of amazing how at the snap of a finger they can do one and then toggle right to another and just get right into it.”
https://www.nba.com/magic/orlando-magic-miami-heat-game-preview-story-20210314
2021-03-14 16:43:24Z
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