The Orlando Magic produced an effort devoid of proper effort or execution in a 124-97 loss to the Charlotte Hornets on Thursday, leaving questions about what it will take to effectively produce on a consistent basis.
ORLANDO — The Orlando Magic’s first game at home in nearly two weeks bore deplorable results as they fell to the Charlotte Hornets on Thursday, 124-97.
With a vexed inflection, Magic coach Jamahl Mosley sat at the postgame podium and summed up his team’s effort:
“It’s unacceptable”, he said candidly. “Shots didn't fall. We stopped guarding.”
It did not take long for Orlando to abandon its defensive effort. After Desmond Bane hit a 3-pointer to open the game, the Magic never led again.
Charlotte guards LaMelo Ball and Brandon Miller jumped on Orlando’s defense and accounted for their team’s first 11 points. From there, things continued to spiral out of control for the Magic as the deficit grew to 15 points before the end of the first quarter.
The Hornets increased their lead in the second quarter, and by halftime, they sat comfortably in the driver’s seat with a 21-point advantage after shooting nearly 50 percent from the perimeter. By the end of the third quarter, the Magic had trailed by as many as 33 points and, just like against the Memphis Grizzlies in London on Sunday, such a deficit would be too difficult to overcome.
To Mosley, not only was his team’s lack of defense unacceptable; it was shocking.
“It is a little shocking,” he said. “You got to give the Hornets a ton of credit, the way they came out and played. They played last night; they got beat; they responded with a sense of urgency. Obviously, 35 in that first quarter. But shots didn't fall, and we let it impact our defense.”
“You sit down and guard. You sit down and guard the damn basketball. That's what you do,” Mosley added with tone indicative of frustration. “You take it personally when guys blow by you. You take it personally when your teammate gets scored on, when you get scored on.”
“When they do miss, you go box out, hit somebody and get a damn rebound. That's what you do.”
With back-to-back underwhelming performances and more than enough in the season to display a concerning trend, the Magic are going to have to practice what they preach to find success.
“Action versus words. It's easy to say; hard to do. You have to have a mindset of, ‘I'm going to do whatever it takes to go get this thing done.’ I can easily say we're going to come out, and we're going to go after him, and we're going to be aggressive.”
“And then you miss two shots, three shots, and you stop guarding. You miss two shots, you miss three shots, and you stop getting back. Those are all actionable items. Those are things that are in our control.”
After another ugly loss, Magic forward Paolo Banchero knows something has to give.
“I think just coming in prepared; coming in with a plan,” Banchero said after leading the Magic with 23 points “When you see something trending a certain way, you got to change something; you got to figure it out; you got to fix it; come up with a plan, something. So, I don't think we've done that yet, and it showed going down big the last — I mean, before even the European Cup — the same thing happened when we played Charlotte here a couple weeks ago, [we] went down big, and they blew us out.”
“So, it's been something that's been happening and can't just say that we want to change it without doing anything to change it.”