2024/2025 General Game Thread

[Jay Magic 1,328]

2 minutes ago, MagicOne said:

Kuzma and Giannis had a combined 7 missed ft's. Doc could smell the victory. However, it was our players that could smell ULTRA!

Yes ... ULTRA strange my. Anyway.. you are Magic fan of sorts so it's all love.. 

[MagicOne 140]

3 minutes ago, Jay Magic said:

Yes ... ULTRA strange my. Anyway.. you are Magic fan of sorts so it's all love.. 

Yes indeed! This is a time to be celebrating! Every time the Magic win I smell ULTRA! Wouldn't it be something to win all 5 of these road games after losing 5 games in a row at home?!

[Jay Magic 1,328]

2 minutes ago, MagicOne said:

Yes indeed! This is a time to be celebrating! Every time the Magic win I smell ULTRA! Wouldn't it be something to win all 5 of these road games after losing 5 games in a row at home?!

I see no reason why we can't

[All Eyes On Me 1,343]

Good W. We can beat or lose to any team in the league, apparently. If Cole and AB could do what they did tonight with any sort of consistency, we’d be in much better shape

[MagicOne 140]

1 minute ago, Jay Magic said:

I see no reason why we can't

Same here. Especially after what I saw tonight. The toughest game is gonna be the last game of the road trip at Cleveland on national tv. But when we play team ball and trust the process we can beat anybody. It's when we play hero ball that we get into trouble. Tonight, when things started to go bad, we stayed the course and stuck together. Big difference.

[MagicOne 140]

3 minutes ago, All Eyes On Me said:

Good W. We can beat or lose to any team in the league, apparently. If Cole and AB could do what they did tonight with any sort of consistency, we’d be in much better shape

In fairness to Cole this is his second straight 20 point plus game. So, he is starting to build a little momentum. You know what truly won the game for us tonight in all seriousness? It was hitting those 8 threes in the first quarter. If we were just a below average team shooting 3's and not so horrible, we would have 40 wins right now. The magic number (no pun intended) for us seems to be hitting at least 12 in a game. If we can do that in these last 17 games, then we will win most of those games.

[MagicOne 140]

Happy to see that Markelle is getting another shot in the NBA with the Kings. And he is playing pretty well for them thus far. All the best to him!

[JJZFL 703]

7 hours ago, MagicOne said:

Same here. Especially after what I saw tonight. The toughest game is gonna be the last game of the road trip at Cleveland on national tv. But when we play team ball and trust the process we can beat anybody. It's when we play hero ball that we get into trouble. Tonight, when things started to go bad, we stayed the course and stuck together. Big difference.

There is also a back to back as part of this road trip from New Orleans to Minnesota on the second night which seems like a potential scheduling loss to me.  NBA making it extra difficult for us apparently.  

[Jamesdin 69]

9 hours ago, JJZFL said:

Yep.  We had that look tonight.  Nearly blew it again by not using our timeout to advance the ball.  That seems to be a frequent problem lately.  
 

Fortunately didn’t wind up mattering.  Great win!

Our coaching needs to step up. They should know when to call timeout. They have the power. When the going gets though, they get reduced into a cheerleader in the sideline. 

[Luke_FfS 293]

That game could be the perfect resume of our weird season. Losing 3 in a row at home against tanking teams just to win on the road against the Bucks that were 9-1 in the last ten. Weird weird weird, but I'll take the W.

[Soul Bro 1,505]

Credit to Paulo for continuing to get healthy and get better. Also credit to Cole for a great game last night.

[Soul Bro 1,505]

Quote

"We've dealt with a lot this year, everybody knows that," Banchero said. "I think after this All-Star break, we wanted to come out and give ourselves a chance to be in the postseason. It doesn't really matter what seed, we just want to be in there. So regardless of us dropping those games at home, we know that we're still in the running for the postseason.

"We have a chance to not only get in the postseason, but win our division," Banchero added. 'That's nothing that we take lightly. We want to accomplish that."

Now on the other side of their losing streak, the Magic are transitioning approaches, going from "just get one" to focusing on one game at a time. By controlling what they can control, Orlando believes the rest will play itself out.

https://www.si.com/nba/magic/news/just-get-one-orlando-magic-believe-momentum-can-build-after-snapping-losing-skid-nba-paolo-banchero-franz-wagner-cole-anthony-damian-lillard-giannis-antetokounmpo-jamahl-mosley-doc-rivers