JJZFL

Thank you.

Is there any way to get audio other than listening to AM radio? I'm not in range of 580 AM at night, and the internet stream of 580 blocks Magic games.

That was reflected in today's Sentinel article from Josh Robbins. Didn't specifically mention second half starts so much, just general need to maintain intensity the whole game, scratch and claw for every win. Part of the losing culture he described was feeling like you gave a good effort in the first half, so you've met expectations and done your job no matter how the game turns out. Again, Skiles wants to completely change that mentality, and won't hesitate to bench people in order to accomplish it. Robbins mentioned something which some of us have expressed concerns about here, about the trade off for being terrible and getting lottery picks being the development of these bad mental habits.

This wasn't Skiles take at all. See the article in the Sentinel today emphasizing how the Magic have developed a losing culture these past few years and that Skiles believes an important (and difficult) part of his job is to change that. He would be the very last person to dismiss the final score.

Wilt Chamberlin and Darryl Armstrong

Your points are legit. I think I misunderstood your post. If we draft fifteenth or something next year (hope it's not too much lower than that) and somehow find a star, then I'll be adding my praise of Henny to everyone else's.

Actually I really hope that when 2016 arrives, Magic fans aren't talking about, or even thinking about, the 2016 draft.

Luke Ridnour?

I'll say what I said about the schedule last summer as well. The key will be if anyone still cares about watching the Magic in January and beyond, regardless of who they're playing. If they do, the season will be a success.

Didn't the Magic extend Jacque Vaughn's contract last year? What happened to him?

That's just his usual posting style, shedding more heat than light on any topic by being needlessly insulting. Which is why I tend to ignore his posts. He apparently also doesn't read very well, because in my post I never said we couldn't get defensive rebounds. I did say we couldn't get them in close games "when it mattered". Anyone remember us making the key plays, including rebounding, that helped us win the close ones last year?

I agree this. A lot of how much we improve this year, if we improve at all, will depend on how much of a difference the new coach makes, as opposed to how much of a problem we may have with an unbalanced roster that doesn't fit together very well. I agree that we need to see how they play before that can be determined. Given the past three years, I'm just more skeptical than you are.

I read what you "explained". However, you might be forgetting that we tried a lot of that same strategy last year. We were 25th in the league defensively, mostly due to poor interior defense. It also seemed like we could not get defensive rebounds when it mattered in close games. Just because you say we could "actually do pretty well" doesn't make it true, especially since the strategy didn't look good at all last year. IIRC, you had some theories last summer about why you thought no one would want to play last year's team because they would be so good defensively. Now you can have 100 theories about why you think things will be different this year. And maybe you will be right. But it's very far from a sure thing.

I don't agree with this. I think with that lineup we get torched on the boards, and have grossly inadequate interior defense. We saw how that worked out last season.

You can call it negative but I was correct the past couple of summers when people were way over-estimating what we had. I've already said I'm more optimistic this season because of the coaching change. But......it kind of depends on how much of the teams terribleness last year was due to coaching. Because the roster really hasn't changed that much. In particular we didn't do much at all with power forward, probably our biggest weakness last year. So as I said, we'll see. People tend to look at the team with rose colored glasses during the summer. I'm not doing that. You want to call that negative, *shrugs*, that's fine.

We'll see. Hope springs eternal but it was only a few short months ago that we were gritting our teeth trying to watch them and could not wait for the season to end. There was a lot of talk about how many holes there were in the roster, and how the team was made up of pieces that didn't fit well together. Since then we've added a new coach and made some relatively small roster changes. Is that enough to justify the optimism in your post? I'm not so sure. As I said, we'll see.........

Also we've said Skiles is the kind of coach who holds his players responsible. Playing time is not automatic. Goof off on defense and you may find yourself on the bench. Having some depth allows him the flexibility to coach like that.

Didn't Gordon have an injury last year that kept him out of a fair number of games? Not Rob's fault, of course, but to call him the "bullet dodger" may be something of an overstatement.

Given how last years prediction turned out, your post isn't all that reassuring.

The nature of predictions is that you make them in advance.

I think that's reasonable. To say that I "don't understand how a year together, a good off-season, and improvement in all facets of the game can change a team" after the past 3 seasons seems pretty far-fetched. People were saying much the same thing last summer and we see how that turned out. We don't know how much "improvement in all facets of the game" there's going to be, if any. Optimism is fine, but it should be tempered by the reality of where we've been, and avoiding some of these over-confident pronouncements.

So basically the same group that was outplayed on a regular basis last year becomes very strong this year, based on Gordon's (broken jaw) performance in a few summer league games? Sorry I think that's a stretch. Of course the biggest difference is the coach, and that gives me some reason for optimism, but we'll have to see. The main question to me is whether the team was as bad as they were last year mainly as a result of coaching, or mainly because they didn't have the right mix of players (of course it could be a combination of both). If it's the players, then even a better coach will struggle.

I don't know if I'd say "great" draft picks. We missed out on the consensus franchise players because our lottery luck wasn't all that good. Losing for years can also create a losing culture that becomes very hard to break away from. Let's hope that doesn't happen to us.

It's not about the individual moves. You can make great individual moves and still not build a team that comes together. So far this team has shown very little the past 3 years. I've said several times now that I'm a bit more optimistic for next season, because we finally have a legit coach. But our roster really hasn't changed very much from last year, and we were painful to watch again last year. There indeed was a lot of optimism last summer about last season, and a lot of people were predicting how foolish the "experts" would look for predicting we would be bottom-dwellers again. Well the experts were right, and our vociferous guys on the board were wrong. As I've been saying for three years, the mark of a great GM is not that he can build a lousy team. Anyone can do that. The trick is to have the rebuild come together at some point and be a good team. We haven't seen that yet. I'll be happy to give Hennigan all the credit he might deserve if we start to see this team come together. But not yet.......... I think the "in Henny we trust" stuff is ridiculous.

So where is the upgrade to PF, which meant getting a guy who can play decent defense in addition to not being a nonentity on offense? Are we going to be Swiss cheese in the paint yet again? I thought that was our biggest need this summer in addition to shooting (which we did work on)