JJZFL

Center?? How about power forward?

What's the matter with him?

I thought we competed when we easily could have folded. Second night of a back to back, playing against a team with a perfect record at home, down 18 to 2 or something stupid like that to start. But we didn't quit. I'll give us credit for that, and I'm not one for moral victories in general.

Magic proved they could play defense against a good team, at least for a couple of quarters. They competed and didn't get blown out, after a horrible start. I'm satisfied with the effort tonight.

If only it were just the Spurs putting 30+ on us in the first quarter. I can understand how the Spurs defense can shut us down but defense is a lot about effort. We should not be this inept on "d" with a young and supposedly athletic team.

Our defense = terrible. 30+ points given up in 1st quarter.......again.

We're off to a good start along those lines

OK, I see your point now.

That may be true but it's not necessarily relevant. For decades the top tennis players in the world were all under 25, before equipment changes made the impact of split second reflexes less important. You'd be hard pressed currently to find a top female gymnast who's over 20 (the ones on our 2012 team were almost all 15 and 16 except for one old-timer who was 18). On the other hand, in golf, a 35 year old can easily compete at the highest levels. It really is sport specific as to when athletes hit their peak, and full brain development may or may not be a relevant factor depending on the sport.

I agree with the sentiment but he has taken out the whole starting unit and replaced them with 5 different players a few times. It seemed to work once but not really since. When your top 10 aren't performing, there's not that much left.

I would put every single Magic player in the third tier. I know hope springs eternal about our youngest players but again, it's exactly what we were saying about Harkless a couple of years ago. No one in their right mind would trade us a top 25 player for Payton or Mario or both of them together.

OK. Are we saying that AG and Mario are so good or have shown so much potential that they can't be traded unless it's for an established star? I doubt very many people outside of this forum would agree with that.

Don't know how we can say that AG and Mario are untouchable. A couple of years ago people were saying the same thing about Harris, Harkless, and whatever other "young gun" du jour was popular. Just because people are young with potential doesn't mean they'll be stars. I doubt anyone would give us anything for Hejonza at this point, who has proven very little. Gordon is a bit more interesting, but hardly untouchable.

Even the team "most likely" to get the #1 pick, which is the team with the worst record in the league, has only a 25% chance of getting the first pick. They have about a 46% chance of getting one of the first two picks. In the Wiggins draft, the Magic had the 3rd worst record in the league. That gave them about a 47% chance of getting one of the first 3 picks. They wound up with pick #4, which I think was statistically the pick they had the best chance of getting. Note that they had a 53% chance of not getting one of the first three picks, so it's hard to argue that it was "bad luck" that they got pick #4. If the argument is that the only way any decent GM could rebuild the Magic is to swing for the fences by making the team terrible and going all out for the draft, and any other approach would be worse, then I don't agree.

True, although in fairness to Skiles, he's not tried to make a lot of excuses for this team in his press conferences.

I don't think we've had bad luck. We'd have to check the statistics but I think our luck has been about average based on the percentages. Remember, we did get the number 2 pick one of the "tank" years.

In the post-game presser, Skiles talked about the players having experienced a lot of losses the past few years in response to a question (I don't exactly recall the question, it might have been about lack of consistent effort or something like that). Basically he was saying that they don't have winning habits and a winning mental framework. So with regards to the discussion Payton and I were having towards the end of the Bucks game thread, Skiles at least apparently believes in the idea of the players having developed bad mental habits due to years of losing (losing culture).

Odds were always against getting that star. If that's the strategy it's pretty high risk. Either luck out in the draft or suck for a long time.

Our TV color guy is as bad as the team. I love the way the announcers try to find some stupid statistic as a silver lining. "Well we may be losing by 30 but we're two out of three on running left handed 5 footers".

You could be right. However, we currently have a guy most people think is strong on defense but not very good on offense, Dedmon, and he hardly gets into games. It is possible that Skiles doesn't think Dedmon is disciplined enough in his defensive schemes, I don't know about that, but it looks like Skiles may want more than just a solid defender.

Unfortunately not so easy to do. Just putting a geezer or two out there won't help, we've already seen that with Frye. It will need to someone with decent talent, and skills that compliment what the Magic have now. That's not so easy to find.

True. But that implies his strategy depended on luck.

Fair enough. You don't believe in the concept of teams developing winning or losing cultures, so that's never concerned you regarding our rebuilding process. I do believe in that concept, and so have felt differently. Others can read this and make up their own minds (or not care about the issue at all

And that scenario would in fact be a major problem from a Henny standpoint. Put out a very bad product for 3-4 years, then have little to show for it at the end of that time frame. I think if that's the way this turns out, he's gone.

So.....I'm not insane. I'm a little surprised that you, as a moderator, throw such terms around so casually in what's supposed to be a friendly discussion. But anyway....... I made two points, neither of which is directly addressed in your post: 1) Youth often but not always correlates with inexperience. In our case, our players may be young but the starters have reasonable NBA experience. Your chart above doesn't correct for that, so I don't know if the young teams listed above with bad records also had very little NBA experience. 2) Nowhere in my post did I come close to suggesting that any time a team goes from good to bad or vice versa that it's due to mental factors. There can be a hundred different reasons, and every situation is different. I was talking about our team only. The fact is that we allowed ourselves, for strategic reasons, to have the worst record in the league over the past 3 years. Most of our players have grown up in that system. They have seen loss after loss. When games are close, they have learned through experience that they usually lose. That's the "losing culture" that a number of us expressed concern about throughout this process. In the Charlotte game, for example, as things were starting to unravel, you could see the team tightening up. Everyone was playing not to be the one to cause a loss, rather than to take the game to the opponent. Those kinds of mental habits are difficult to break.