Let's Be Real...The Call Sucked, But WE BEAT OURSELVES

Nick Anderson 4 President · May 5, 2008

I'm sure we are all saying "what if". What if that call at the end of the 3rd went our way? (BTW, it seems like those types of calls never go our way) A closer analysis of the game reveals that while we played much better overall than in Game 1, WE beat ourselves in Game 2. It wasn't the call, it wasn't the overall officiating, it was a conglomerate of reason why we lost this game. Let's visit these reasons:

-Because our defense is terrible, we tend to make the Pistons do one of two things: 1)Either score easily, or 2)Shoot free throws because we bail them out and foul them. Our lack of defense allows them to score at will and it's gut-wrenching to watch. To put it in perspective, we hit 7 straight threes in the third, only to be leading by 1. That's 21 points in that stretch we put up, not to mention the rest of the points we put up in the quarter, and yet we still could not take a significant lead going into the fourth. Even though we scored a scorching 36 points in the 3rd, Detroit also scored 28. We cannot beat the pistons unless we get stops, and our squad just seems incapable of doing so for consistent stretches.

-Our 7 straight 3's in the third was amazing, but let's get real, that is bound to never happen again. Therefore, I consider that a "fluke", which means we got back into the game on a fluke. Had it not been for that fluke, we would have probably been down by 20 going into the 4th. Please don't get me wrong, I loved watching all of those 3's go down, I'm just saying that it took literally a miracle to get back into the game because once again we weren't getting defensive stops. If we had gotten those defensive stops, we could have been up 10 or so.

-Our turnovers were killer. While most of them were in the first half, we had some critical ones towards the end. A lot of them were forced off of Detroit's defense, however many were unforced as well and completely inexplicable to SVG and the fans. As we all know, these turnovers pretty much turn into sure points off of turnovers for the veteran savvy Pistons, once again because we can't stop them on the other end.

-Our decision making late in the fourth was terrible. I know the players are playing with a lot of emotion towards the end of the game, and making these claims are easy for me to make since I was watching the game from the comfort of my place. However, Rashard making a 1 handed pass from the block to 6'nothing Jameer at quarter court was a very bad decision. Even worse was Turkoglu's 3 out of the timeout that hit the backboard and rim so hard that Illinois thought they had another earthquake coming! With 40 seconds on the clock why does he take an ill advised 3 instead of at least driving the ball in and trying to get to the line? Because he wants to be the hero? Well it's tough to be a hero when you have been struggling offensively for two series' now. Why not increase your percentages and probabilities by taking a better shot? It just seems like common sense to me. You miss the shot, now you instantly slash your team's morale because now they know they have to resort to fouling at some point to be able to get the ball back into your hands. Way to go Turk (Shot out to DOM, I see you).

-Does SVG have anything going on behind the pick and roll? Dwight picks for Jameer and Jameer rolls. Now what? The other 3 players don't move and stay camped out at the 3 while the pick and roll is going on. Hmm, let's see, I wonder if that's going to be tough on Detroit. Not at all! The reason Detroit tears into us on the pick and rolls on their end is because they penetrate well AND have great off the ball movement from the rest of their players, essentially causing mass confusion for our squad because we are terrible at rotating around. Turk, Lewis, and Dwight fall asleep constantly on assignment. Heck, maybe Jameer might have been our best defender on the perimeter! With no other movement on our pick and rolls, you reduce the game to a simple defender switch and it becomes a 1 on 1 game again. Mo is such a great cutter, he needs to be just running from sideline to sideline on every offensive set for the Magic. Run double curls off the screen. Set a double screen. There so much that could be done but I don't see SVG drawing up anything different than a simple pick and roll. Just as Detroit causes us confusion on defense through their picks, we need to do the same while they are on defense.

-Our bench is non-existent. Granted our starters are playing huge minutes, but 4 points from our bench is not going to get the job done. SVG is obviously playing our starters huge minutes because he doesn't have faith in our bench, and rightfully so. Where is that explosive Dooling we've seen throughout the season? Where are Bogan's 3s that we've gotten used to seeing. If you're not going to score, at least give us something. Rebounds, Assists, Steals, SOMETHING!

I could go on and on about our play tonight including game 1. Feel free to add to this laundry list if you like. I know I"m coming off like a pessimist and a total Magic hater, but let me just say that I love our team. The purpose of this was to expose how we beat ourselves tonight and how it didn't come down to the boneheaded call at the end of the 3rd, or Dooling inadvertently pushing down Rip Hamilton with under 30 left and being called for the foul. While we were much closer to Detroit in this game as compared to Game 1, we have too many negatives active in our gameplay right now and we will have to eliminate just about all of them to even have a prayer against a team that has a better matchup against us and are cool and calm in the playoffs. I have tickets to games 3 and 4 in ORL, here's to hoping that we do something different in the subsequent games so we can tie this series up 2-2 and actually make it interesting for the TNT guys to call. Let's turn it around Magic, game 3 is do or die.

Nick Anderson 4 President · May 5, 2008