Official 2013 Southwest Airlines Orlando Pro Summer League Thread

[JJZFL 620]

Both Vucevic and Harkless improved considerably, just check their season splits for evidence. The team on the court at the end of the season was completely different than the beginning of the season and missing key veteran players...that's kind of the point

Stats do look a little better for those two.

 

Team basically fell apart after BBD went down, without any other changes. That was before the later changes to the roster and injuries to some of the other veterans. But I agree that overall it's hard to judge the team based on last year. They certainly got worse during the year from a record and defense standpoint but there were a bunch of mitigating factors as you've said.

 

I hope that we have good young prospects who will show improvement as we move ahead. Just not at all convinced yet. Also not yet convinced that the coaching is adequate. Time will tell, I guess.

[Bauncey Chillups 288]

1st-2nd year players are almost always terrible at winning games no matter how talented they are. Kevin Durant's first two years consisted of a 20 win season and a 23 win season. Since none of our young prospects last year are what you could call blue chip talents given that nobody was selected in the lottery I don't know what your expectations were for last season.

 

This is why Oladipo, inspite of being arguably the best wing defender in college basketball last year, will probably suck at NBA level defense early on. Don't get mad when he gets lit up.

[BN 44]

1st-2nd year players are almost always terrible at winning games no matter how talented they are. Kevin Durant's first two years consisted of a 20 win season and a 23 win season. Since none of our young prospects last year are what you could call blue chip talents given that nobody was selected in the lottery I don't know what your expectations were for last season.

 

This is why Oladipo, inspite of being arguably the best wing defender in college basketball last year, will probably suck at NBA level defense early on.Don't get mad when he gets lit up.

 

[Secretly Space Jesus 670]

Wow. Guess I touched a nerve. Lots of paragraphs there.

 

It's terrifying to me that you're impressed by paragraphs. It's as though that were indicative of anything more than "I finished 4th grade". Maybe for you that is impressive, I suppose. I don't really know what your background is.

 

Who said we were awesome in the first month and a half? We weren't. But we were a heck of a lot better than we were after that, at least based on our record. Yeah, injuries had something to do with our poor record after that. But I'm not convinced that's all there is to it. I'm not sure the coaching is all that great, for example. Big baby is not LeBron. Why should the whole team fall apart without that one player?

 

I've already explained this multiple times now, and at this point I have to assume you are either refusing to read the things I've written or you have some kind of reading disability. The team was in no relevant way better in the first two months than they were in the rest of the season: they just played at a slower pace, which repressed opponent's PPG numbers, and took advantage of an easy early schedule to rack up a few wins against other bad teams. Once their schedule got harder, the team started losing.

 

And the team had already lost 17 of their previous 19 games when Big Baby got hurt. His loss was essentially meaningless to the team's overall production, particularly once Harris got here, which is why I haven't claimed otherwise.

 

Magic franchise worth about half a billion. 250 Million is a lot of money but the team is worth a lot of money. Teams regularly get offered excellent deals by cities who want to attract pro sports teams. So your number without context has little meaning.

 

Ok, sure. Context then. The total amount of incentives given to the then Sonics to move to OKC and become the Thunder was 120 million dollars in renovations to an existing arena, a new practice facility, and tax breaks. So slightly under half of what the Magic are getting from Orlando.

 

You're greatly discounting how much of a sweetheart deal the Magic have here.

 

If the team loses community support in the next few years (not this year and not next year, as I already said), yes there is some risk that they would look at revenue projections and make a business decision to move. Certainly hope it never comes to that. But there are risks to being a bad team for extended periods of time (not two years).

 

This argument has no validity, because you've given no timeline for anything you just said. How much time constitutes "extended periods of time"? 5 years? 12? 30? When their lease is up?

Yeah, the team could very well wanna buy out of their lease once it gets relatively inexpensive to do so in the late 2020s if the team is still really bad and there's no fan support, but that's literally assuming 12-15 years of consistently bad play and consistently poor fan turnout.

 

And given that Orlando has, to its credit, proven to be a very good local draw when the team is good, that really wouldn't likely be much of an issue.

 

Once again, never said that players regressed individually. Basketball is not an individual sport. It's a team game. The team regressed. I explained my reasoning above. You don't like it, fine. So I'm not going to respond to irrelevant questions about which players regressed individually since I never said that any did (I'm not sure they didn't but there is no reason to go there).

 

Your reasoning as you've explained it so far, is "the team's record was bad, and then it was really bad. So they regressed".

 

I've already explained why that logic is faulty at best: the early schedule was easy so the team's record overstated their talent, the team's actual performance was still really bad even in the early months, the fact that there were completely different people playing for the team in March than in November(so that one shouldn't be beholden to the other's performance. If Drew Brees got hurt in game 4 next season, no one with 2 brain cells to bang together would yell at his backup/the guy they traded to replace him for not equaling his performance. Because that's crazy. The same would be true for any starter being replaced by a backup. If the backup was as good as the starter, they wouldn't be a backup.)

 

Which players do you think improved?

Harkless improved substantially over the course of the season, both as a man-defender and as an offensive weapon. At the beginning of the season, Harkless was a one trick pony who could dunk on offense and nothing else, while his defense was ok at best. By the end of the year, he was a legitimate slasher who looked like he could at least develop a decent corner 3, while also proving repeatedly to be a well above average on-the-ball defender with more upside on that front. He eventually hit the rookie wall, like every rookie does, but that's hardly something to worry about. The fact is that after November, I wasn't sure if he would ever be much of anything without substantial improvement, given how lost he looked. Now I'd argue his floor is "Bruce Bowen with a decent slashing game." Unfortunately, he also seems to have Bowen's FT problem, but that's a whole other issue.

 

Vucevic improved too, though his improvement was mitigated somewhat when he was clearly playing way too many minutes while noticeably beatup. That led to his performance trailing off at the end as he was clearly running on fumes for the last 6 weeks of the year. And even with that being the case, his best statistical month of the year was April.

 

Nicholson only does one thing particularly well, but he showed increased confidence throughout last year in his post game, before hitting the rookie wall in mid March, and seeing his game fall off a cliff.

 

It'd be hard to say if O'Quinn improved, just because I had no idea what to expect from the guy going in, but he proved throughout the season that he can be a 12th man/fourth big man, and will contribute by playing hard. Over the course of the season, he even demonstrated surprisingly soft hands and decent passing for any big man, let alone a second round flier guy.

 

Really the only guy who "regressed", if you can even call it that, was Moore, and that's largely because he was shooting well above his own ceiling for the first 5 weeks of the year. His coming back to Earth wasn't a surprise, it was a foregone conclusion.

 

Do you think the team improved?

 

Well lets see:

• The team was terrible to start with. whether people realized it at the time or not.
• The team's young players of Harkless, Vucevic, Nicholson and O'Quinn all either showed noticeable, demonstrable improvement OR demonstrated they had the capacity to be contributors when no previous capacity was known.
• The team absolutely robbed Milwaukee blind, getting a 20 year old combo forward with a good handle, a decent shot, a good driving game and solid rebounding in exchange for their backup shooting guard.
• The team finally stopped giving Hedo huge minutes, eliminating a huge black hole on offense and just a huge hole on defense via addition by subtraction.

So yes, they improved.

 

I'll leave comments about the moderators out of my post. I never said you violated the TOS, just that your posting is uncivil and seems purposely inflammatory.

 

I have no idea what aspect of anything would "seem(s) purposely inflammatory", and I have no idea how I could ever have control over what you choose to infer. As a general rule, I've always found it's simplest to assume that if someone wants to insult you, they'll insult you. If you want to assume I'm being inflammatory(when I'm merely being incredulous), that's really on you.

 

As for your gross accusation of my being uncivil, I must say I'm so outraged that my monocle simply leaped from my eye and I spit out my tea. I hope this gross indignity doesn't lead to an imbalance of the humors, or worse, the dreaded consumption.

[Joseph_Kuhr 61]

DOM, you're such an ass sometimes. Lol

[Johnny Castaway 31]

DOM, you're such an ass sometimes. Lol

 

dude thrives on it LOL ... yeah, I know! I'm such a snowflake ... :rolleyes:

[Malik Buttface 57]

It's terrifying to me that you're impressed by paragraphs. It's as though that were indicative of anything more than "I finished 4th grade". Maybe for you that is impressive, I suppose. I don't really know.

 

I've already explained this multiple times now, and at this point I have to assume you are either refusing to read the things I've written or you have some kind of reading disability. The team was in no relevant way better in the first two months than they were in the rest of the season: they just played at a slower pace, which repressed opponent's PPG numbers, and took advantage of an easy early schedule to rack up a few wins against other bad teams. Once their schedule got harder, the team started losing.

 

And the team had already lost 17 of their previous 19 games when Big Baby got hurt. His loss was essentially meaningless to the team's overall production, particularly once Harris got here, which is why I haven't claimed otherwise.

 

 

 

Ok, sure. Context then. The total amount of incentives given to the then Sonics to move to OKC and become the Thunder was 120 million dollars in renovations to an existing arena, a new practice facility, and tax breaks. So slightly under half of what the Magic are getting from Orlando.

 

You're greatly discounting how much of a sweetheart deal Orlando has here.

 

 

 

This argument has no validity, because you've given no timeline for anything you just said. How much time constitutes "extended periods of time"? 5 years? 12? 30? When their lease is up?

Yeah, the team could very well wanna buy out of their lease once it gets relatively inexpensive to do so in the late 2020s if the team is still really bad and there's no fan support, but that's literally assuming 12-15 years of consistently bad play and consistently poor fan turnout.

 

And given that Orlando has, to its credit, proven to be a very good local draw when the team is good, that really wouldn't likely be much of an issue.

 

 

 

Your reasoning as you've explained it so far, is "the team's record was bad, and then it was really bad. So they regressed".

 

I've already explained why that logic is faulty at best: the early schedule was easy so the team's record overstated their talent, the team's actual performance was still really bad even in the early months, the fact that there were completely different people playing for the team in March than in November(so that one shouldn't be beholden to the other's performance. If Drew Brees got hurt in game 4 next season, no one with 2 brain cells to bang together would yell at his backup/the guy they traded to replace him for not equaling his performance. Because that's crazy. The same would be true for any starter being replaced by a backup. If the backup was as good as the starter, they wouldn't be a backup.)

 

 

Harkless improved substantially over the course of the season, both as a man-defender and as an offensive weapon. At the beginning of the season, Harkless was a one trick pony who could dunk on offense and nothing else, while his defense was ok at best. By the end of the year, he was a legitimate slasher who looked like he could at least develop a decent corner 3, while also proving repeatedly to be a well above average on-the-ball defender with more upside on that front. He eventually hit the rookie wall, like every rookie does, but that's hardly something to worry about. The fact is that after November, I wasn't sure if he would ever be much of anything without substantial improvement, given how lost he looked. Now I'd argue his floor is "Bruce Bowen with a decent slashing game." Unfortunately, he also seems to have Bowen's FT problem, but that's a whole other issue.

 

Vucevic improved too, though his improvement was mitigated somewhat when he was clearly playing way too many minutes while noticeably beatup. That led to his performance trailing off at the end as he was clearly running on fumes for the last 6 weeks of the year. And even with that being the case, his best statistical month of the year was April.

 

Nicholson only does one thing particularly well, but he showed increased confidence throughout last year in his post game, before hitting the rookie wall in mid March, and seeing his game fall off a cliff.

 

It'd be hard to say if O'Quinn improved, just because I had no idea what to expect from the guy going in, but he proved throughout the season that he can be a 12th big man, and will contribute by playing hard. Over the course of the season, he even demonstrated surprisingly soft hands and decent passing for any big man, let alone a second round flier guy.

 

Really the only guy who "regressed", if you can even call it that, was Moore, and that's largely because he was shooting well above his own ceiling for the first 5 weeks of the year. His coming back to Earth wasn't a surprise, it was a foregone conclusion.

 

 

Well lets see:

• The team was terrible to start with. whether people realized it at the time or not.
• The team's young players of Harkless, Vucevic, Nicholson and O'Quinn all either showed noticeable, demonstrable improvement OR demonstrated they had the capacity to be contributors when no previous capacity was known.
• The team absolutely robbed Milwaukee blind, getting a 20 year old combo forward with a good handle, a decent shot, a good driving game and solid rebounding in exchange for their backup shooting guard.
• The team finally stopped giving Hedo huge minutes, eliminating a huge black hole on offense and just a huge hole on defense via addition by subtraction.

So yes, they improved.

 

 

 

I have no idea what aspect of anything would "seem(s) purposely inflammatory", and I have no idea how I could ever have control over what you choose to infer. As a general rule, I've always found it's simplest to assume that if someone wants to insult you, they'll insult you. If you want to assume I'm being inflammatory(when I'm merely being incredulous), that's really on you.

 

As for your gross accusation of my being uncivil, I must say I'm so outraged that my monocle simply leaped from my eye and I spit out my tea. I hope this gross indignity doesn't lead to an imbalance of the humors, or worse, the dreaded consumption.

 

DOM-inated

[Berto 338]

I was hoping for red font at some point, but I guess that's sooo 2007.

[Secretly Space Jesus 670]

I was hoping for red font at some point, but I guess that's sooo 2007.

 

The first time I did red font after the board switch over a few years ago, the red font wound up just being really hard to read. That's why I abandoned it for just having multiple closed quote tags.

 

Next time though, I'll go old school red font just for you, Berto.

[JudeMorrigan 3]

He doesn't seem like the sort to particularly need other's approbation, but I have to say, DOM's posts are one of the main reasons I read this board.

[Berto 338]

The first time I did red font after the board switch over a few years ago, the red font wound up just being really hard to read. That's why I abandoned it for just having multiple closed quote tags.

 

Next time though, I'll go old school red font just for you, Berto.

 

Much obliged fine sir. Let the day bring sunshine and the night afford sweet serenity, you kind town squire.

[HeHateMe 697]

Strongly disagree with this.

 

Team needs to be showing improvement every year. There should be milestones for improvement set and hopefully reached. Otherwise you develop a culture of losing that is very hard to break. Not worth the risk.

 

Some of the strongest Magic supporters on this board may not care if it takes 3-7 years to build the team back up to respectability. But the team will lose support from everyone else. How long will the Magic stay in Orlando with an empty arena and low TV ratings? Again, not worth the risk.

 

First of all, I don't check up on this board for 1 day and all the sudden were talking about selling or relocating the team. The F***?

 

I don't think anyone on this board is willing to wait 7 years, not even 5 years. Not even 4 years. But I think most of us feel that we are on the right track and after a soon to be rough season in store for us, things will really be looking up. Throw in a top 5 pick in a star studed draft, with the roster we already have and things could get fun in a hurry. Oh, and free agency sets up beautifully that summer too.

 

If a fan base jumps ship on a team during a 3 year rebuild than those people were never fans at all, and to them I say good riddance.