JJZFL

Well done, man. Way to kick off the season.

That’s fine with me. Anything that gets rid of the current incentives to lose.

That’s fine with me. Anything that gets rid of the current incentives to lose.

I disagree. I think the league would be better off with no lottery at all, or a severely watered down version. I’d like to see a system where every team that doesn’t make the playoffs has exactly the same random chance at any of the first 14 picks. Anything that incentivizes teams to lose has no place in professional sports.

Thank you for that clarification. Obviously I didn't correctly understand what they did. They reduced the benefit of tanking a little bit but not nearly as much as I thought. I wish they had made the bottom 7 completely identical. As long as they keep just tinkering around the edges, teams will continue to tank. A few will hit it big, and others will follow our route, and be bad for a long time.

I don’t think tanking works that way this year. If I understand correctly, the bottom 7 all have the same chance at picks 1-7.

Very good post. +1 from me.

Preseason has ended but the regular season hasn't quite started yet. Perhaps we need an "in-between seasons" thread or something like that :)?

We gave up 60 points in the second half, including, starting about mid 3rd quarter, many uncontested layups. We gave up 29 in the 4th quarter. We can parse the statistics to try and find something good out of that but I think it’s missing the forest for the trees.

Not after the mid-way point of the 3rd quarter. At that point we just gave up

Ross looked horrific tonight.

I agree with you but that's still worrisome to me. Hallmark of this Magic team past few years is that when they hit a rough stretch they fall apart. They need to play hard even if the shots aren't falling, develop some mental toughness.

They are nowhere near good enough to just blow off the last preseason game when things aren't going their way. Certainly not a good game in terms of establishing an identity as a team that others won't want to play.

Yeah. They've stopped playing defense and are just going through the motions.

I have no idea how many games we’re going to win. I just hope we compete night in and night out. If we do that the team will be worth watching. If at some point Vuch just stands around watching people go past him, and they don’t take him out, it will be time to turn them off.

One more preseason game tomorrow night and soon after that it will be time to retire this thread.

Always tried to call it the way I’ve seen it, admittedly mostly negative these past 5-6 years as I disagreed with our approach, but regardless of that, I think there may now be some light at the end of our tunnel. I sure hope so, anyway. I’m not getting any younger :)

Second successful preseason game from my standpoint, just from point of view of establishing an identity of a team that plays tough defense every night. IF, and it’s a big if, they can keep it up and not hang their heads if they lose a few games in a row, they could finally be fun to watch this season.

We were much better on defense last night than in first preseason game, so from that standpoint I would consider this a successful preseason game.

Agree. Early signs very encouraging. Bamba-Birch looks very interesting also but there's a good chance Birch won't be in the regular rotation.

Not scaring anyone yet. I wish the announcers would stop talking about what great performances everyone had against Flamengo. Talk about meaningless filler.....

Let’s see how we do against NBA competition first before we draw any conclusions. The Brazilian team would probably lose to some of our better college teams.

Amen and +1

Honestly hard to see how the two big man approach works in this day and age. It will be interesting to watch, especially since it seems like most other teams are embracing smaller lineups. Obviously didn’t work with Vuch-Ibaka.

My theory is he's burned out from all the losing.