Magic Aim to Make Familiar-Looking Mavericks Loss a Late-Season Anomaly

ORLANDO, Fla. –– The month of March has featured two different Orlando Magic teams.

One is the quicker-operating, better-shooting, improved third-quarter team that strung together three consecutive victories for the first time in three and a half months and notched road victories over Cleveland and Milwaukee. With the Magic desiring to play their best basketball at this time of year, they seemed to be finding their stride at the right time.

The other showed up Thursday, and has far too frequently throughout a 35-39 regular season's choppy waters. A familiar-looking loss to the shorthanded Dallas Mavericks saw Orlando struggle with many of the same flaws it'd recently begun putting away.

Orlando shot 5-for-30 from distance in the contest – the seventh time this year the Magic have only made five triples in a game, all coming in losses.

"I think that's a big portion of it," Magic coach Jamahl Mosley said Thursday. "Those shots, we're getting good looks."

League tracking data backs his claim. Orlando shot 1-for-13 on open threes and 4-for-17 on wide open threes, per the NBA's publicly available shot-tracking dashboard. Many teams often have their own measurables to determine shot quality, but the generalized snapshot suggests there likely wouldn't be much deviation between Orlando's in-house data and the league's tracking metric.

"When you don't knock threes down when you're getting open looks, it deflates you and those are also easy runouts for transition baskets," Mosley said. "So, you're not able to set your defense as the ball goes through the hoop."

Orlando was shooting 35.3 percent from three in March before Thursday's misfires. The Magic's season-long 31.1 percent accuracy from deep is still the league's worst mark.

Mosley's squad, ranked 27th in points per 100 possessions this year, needs all the bites at the apple it can get. Orlando averages 14.2 turnovers a game this year, but that number had minimized to 12 per game in March. Thursday was again the deviation.

"Not taking care of the basketball, giving them easy baskets and with [the Mavericks], live ball turnovers are tough. You're not getting those back," Mosley said. "I think the reasoning behind us [losing] is the fact that we had 17 turnovers for 22 points, so you gave them easy baskets."

A 35-point showing continued Paolo Banchero's torrid pace, marking his fifth consecutive game of 30-or-more points. Besides Banchero, only two other players in the franchise's 36-year history have accomplished the feat: Shaquille O'Neal and Tracy McGrady.

Yet, the Magic fell to just 2-4 when Banchero scores 35 or more points. Postgame, the star forward reasoned why.

"I think we could've been better about getting into our offense quicker, just figuring out what we're trying to do," Banchero said. "I feel like we weren't really running as much tonight ... we weren't pushing the pace. We kind of let them dictate the pace of the game, and I just feel like the communication was a little spotty out there."

Orlando Magic forward Paolo Banchero (5) dribbles the ball against Dallas Mavericks guard-forward Klay Thompson (31) in the fourth quarter at Kia Center. | Jeremy Reper-Imagn Images

Over the course of this season, the Magic have operated at the league's second-slowest pace and are in the bottom third of fastbreak points scored per game.

While the number of possessions a game hasn't seen much change pre-All-Star break versus post-, the Magic are scoring 15.1 fastbreak points a game since the season's resumption. Specifically in March, they are scoring 15.3 a game in wins but only 10.3 in losses.

"I think that playing slow is going to create more chances to turn the ball over for us, and that's why I believe that the faster we play, the better, because it just limits's everybody's decision tim and just gives guys quicker reads out there on the floor," Banchero said Thursday. "I think with us playing slow came us turning the ball over, not shooting well from three and not really having a great offensive night.

"We just have to make a concerted effort to push the pace on offense."

All of those factors met a head when Dallas scored 17 unanswered points in the third quarter. That was part of a 20-2 run that closed the frame, and the Magic were unable to ever recover.

Before Christmas, the Magic were outscored in just 10 of 31 third quarters and went 3-7 in those contests. Since then, however, opponents have won the third frame in 26 of 43 games. Orlando is just 5-21 when that happens since the holiday.

"I feel like it's been a common issue, and it's biting us in the ass," Banchero said of their third quarter struggles. "But I can't really pinpoint one thing."

"Our toughness kind of subsided a little bit once they started hitting shots, that's been a flaw of ours," Jonathan Isaac said in Orlando's postgame locker room. "To battle so well in the first half ... we went on a run and they sustained themselves, then they went on a run and we didn't.

Added Isaac: "That wasn't to the level of where we've been these last three games to win three in a row."

Mosley said Orlando's aggression didn't match their opposition's out of halftime. Although they'd been better about it in recent games, that wasn't the case Thursday, Mosley said.

"That's our resiliency there," he said. "We contiunue to grow with that and learn from it, because there's not many [games] left. So, you've got to understand exactly what you need to do in these moments."

With eight games remaining in the regular season, the Magic are battling for postseason seeding with every passing day.

Such contrasting performances this late in the year begs two questions: Which Orlando team will continue showing up, and which stretch will look be the anomaly?

Can Orlando recapture its improved form that sparked much-needed wins? Or did Thursday begin a harsh regression to the mean?

The Magic start learning their answer Saturday evening.

"We can't let tonight, to drop this one, affect us in any more games down the road," Isaac said Thursday. "It's got to be something we leave here right now and get our mindsets focused on [Sacramento].

"They're a good team, and we've got to win the game."

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