By John DentonOct. 31, 2015
ORLANDO – As if enduring three-plus hours of emotional swings and a second gut-punch finish in as many games weren’t exhausting enough, the Orlando Magic were forced to re-live many of those moments again on Saturday with a lengthy film session.
Fittingly on Halloween, the horrifying footage resembled a marathon double-feature of scary movies. Sticking with that Halloween theme, legendary boogeymen, Freddy Krueger and Jason have nothing on the pain and suffering that Oklahoma City superstars Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant inflicted on the Magic on Friday night in a torturous double-overtime defeat.
On Saturday, new Magic coach Scott Skiles wanted his team to once again feel the sting of squandering an 18-point second-half lead and falling 139-136 in double overtime to the Thunder. He and his staff prepared a 70-clip video from Friday night’s game – not as punishment but as teaching points so that the Magic can hopefully escape the pitfalls that keep tripping them up in the very near future.
``He could have shown a lot more than he did. He could have damn-near showed the whole game if he wanted to,’’ cracked Magic forward Aaron Gordon, referring to Skiles’ lengthy film session.
Added guard Evan Fournier: ``We watched (video footage) a little bit, but it was more about looking at the mistakes that we did in crunch time. It wasn’t very exciting.’’
The hope for Skiles is that re-living what happened on Friday when the Magic got away from their offensive system in the fourth quarter and had too many defensive lapses down the stretch will help them improve. The next test comes on Sunday (7 p.m. ET tipoff) when the staggered and stunned Magic (0-2) face another likely playoff team in the Bulls (2-1) in Chicago.
``We’re not going to relent off our message. The tape doesn’t lie,’’ Skiles said of continuing to hold players accountable for their actions. ``They’ve been good at looking at it and responding when we’re talking about it, but at some point it has to translate out onto the game floor. What we’ve encountered in these two games also happened in the exhibition season. We’d be up 15 and the other team would make a run and we’d slow down.
``We can look at it now and say, `Well, we should be 2-0.’ But there are too many things going on long term that need to be corrected,’’ Skiles stressed. ``Even if we were 2-0 we would have looked at the same 70 clips, talked about (the mistakes) and not focused so much on the result. … We haven’t reacted poorly, but we haven’t reacted great, either.’’
AN INSTANT CLASSIC
Undoubtedly, Friday night’s game at the Amway Center will go down as one of the greatest games in Magic history what with Victor Oladipo making a go-ahead 3-pointer late in regulation and a tying one at the first OT buzzer and Oklahoma City getting a banked-in, desperation 3-pointer from Russell Westbrook to dramatically force extra time.
Oladipo had the second triple-double of his career with 21 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists, while Westbrook (48 points) and Durant (43 points) battered the Magic for 91 points. And the records didn’t stop there: