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"By The Numbers: What To Do?"

Authored by Marten Liebster - December 23, 2005 - 5:42 pm

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What to do? "It's like deja-vu, all over again." That was one of the many memorable lines from Yogi Berra. Unfortunately, this amply describes the situation here in Orlando. I'm referring not to our winning percentage, but rather the way the game has been played by our team recently. We've returned to the fast break and 1 on 1 offensive style that we exhibited last season. I'm sure you all can recall the result of last season. Brian Hill is the proverbial captain of the ship. It's up to him to formulate a game plan that will be effective. He also is the one that is supposed to get into the player's heads and get them to follow the plan. Many around here have suggestions for him as far as what to do. Some figure that the way to go is get Dwight the ball more often. Much like last season, it seems like we start to ignore Dwight as the game progress. To some extent this is true, much like last season. But in the games we won, Dwight has gotten few touches compared to our losses. Here is the number shots (FT + FG) per quarter by Dwight. Qtr...Won.....Lost 1.....5.4.....5.3 2.....3.4.....2.7 3.....5.5.....5.2 4.....2.3.....4.0 Tot..16.6....17.2 I'm not suggesting that Dwight be ignored by any means. His getting touches is not the biggest problem we have. But one issue with getting Dwight more touches is that he is still learning. With that education come increased mistakes. In our losses he's turned the ball over 2.7 times vs. 2.4 in our victories. Interestingly enough, we are just as turnover prone in our victories as we are in our losses - 14.7 (W) vs 14.9 (L). Not surprisingly, our opponents are doing better in this regard, they "only" have 12.6 per game. Fortunately, this has only yielded an extra .7 shots (FT + FG) per game by our opponents. So if our TOs are in line with the competition, what else is the problem with the Magic? The offense that Hill said he planed to install would increase ball movement and as a result there would be more assists to go around. So far we are doing dreadful in that regard. Qtr....Us.....Them 1......89.....120 2.....109.....107 3......91.....111 4......82.....105 Tot..16.2....19.4 (per game) This, I believe, is in direct relation to the style of offense. I picked a game earlier in the season at random which happened to be about mid season thus far - the 12th game of the season; a victory at home verses Miami. Our record after that game was an even .500 at 6-6. At that point in time some were complaining about the slow paced and structured offense that we were running. During those games our offense more resembled the Princeton style of player and ball movement. We were running a very much a half-court offense. The team averaged 15.7 assists per game and 13.7 TOs per game. We'd averaged more assists, but we were only shooting 43.0% at that point in time - due in large part to our only hitting threes at a 35.9% clip. My thought coming into this article was that we'd have a lot more high percentage shots at this point in time because of us running more often. Our decidedly half court offense did in fact yield many inside shots. Counting any shot that included the word 'Dunk' or 'Layup' in it, we had an average 21.66 per game up to that Miami game, since then the number is essentially the same - 21.63. This is a result of us relying more on the outside shot or forcing a bad shot rather than working that ball around until a good opportunity presented itself. I've stated this several times on the board recently, our biggest issue is not simply getting the ball to back to Howard. He will get his touches in flow of the game if we go back to the structured offense that we ran in the early part of the season. In the first 12 games of the season, he averaged 17 FGAs and FTAs, since then he has 17.6 total shots. This is not to say we abandon the fast breaks completely, as they usually lead to efficient scoring. We need to blend the two, especially now that Hill is back and is able to typically get a quick step down the floor. Come on Brian, get the ship back on course!