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The thing about Jameer Nelson
Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
If you’ve followed Orlando’s season to this point, it’s been impossible to miss the coverage of Jameer Nelson’s slump. Certainly his poor play has been noticeable on the court, but even more striking has been the differences in reaction he inspires. Some observers look at Jameer and see a solid player mired in the valley of statistical inevitability — he’s just missing shots. Other observers watch him and swear there’s something off, that he needs to attack more and look for his own shot. He’s the basketball version of that rock teachers in movies keep on their desks. You know the one that Feeney types from Boy Meets World-esque shows always have: it’s black on one side and white on the other, so two people can be adamant about seeing different colors until we ALL LEARN A LESSON ABOUT PERSPECTIVE. Or something.
This isn’t really a new phenomenon with Nelson. Magic fans have long been divided about him; one subset of fans see him as a frustrating potential engine of the team, a guy who simply needs to focus to regain his All-Star form, while another set of fans has seen him as just better than average, a solid starter but by no means somebody to carry the team. It’s unclear who is right, or whether anybody is. Is there a good Jameer or a bad Jameer? Exactly how much can we expect?
For starters, I looked a few of the numbers from Hoopdata (I would prefer to say I “crunched” some numbers, but Hoopdata pretty much just lays ‘em all out for you). I looked at his 2008-2009 pre-injury numbers and his current season numbers, using these two as his respective peak and valley. Take these with the usual sample size disclaimer, since even the ’08-’09 season was cut short for Nelson by his labrum injury. The first time I looked at the stats, it seemed like Nelson was more or less doing the same things during his best and worst times, that he was just missing shots, per Rob Mahoney’s argument. A closer look, however, reveals some telling things about the aggression of Nelson’s play.
Magic Basketball needs your help
We’re about to start doing a new recurring feature here at MBN, something a little more free-flowing than we sometimes do, and something we want you to contribute to. Every Friday, I’ll be doing a weekly roundup type deal (name TBD), and as part of it, I want y’all to email me questions or concerns about the Magic, the league in general, or really just anything.
Funny story you want to share? Send it. Soul-searching questions I’m unqualified to answer but will any way? Send ‘em. This column will be part hoops analysis and part WHATEVER I WANT TO TALK ABOUT (read: liquor), so you’ve got some latitude. One hitch: I won’t run profanity, but if you have a story clean enough where all I need is to redact a few NSFW words, fire away.
Send all of your brilliant, asinine or humorous missives to us at mbnhoops[at]gmail[dot]com.
I’ll be starting this Friday, and I’m counting on you.
Danny Nowell is a contributing writer for Magic Basketball. Follow him on Twitter.
Dealing with an organizational identity crisis
Photo by Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images
Through the first six games of the season, the Magic have shown themselves to be a team of poles and contrasts. There have been stretches, like the comeback win over the Raptors or the second quarter in the loss against Detroit, when the Magic seem to have rediscovered the discipline, positional flexibility, and cunning that have been the hallmarks of their most successful recent teams.
At other times, though, the Magic have seemed content to allow games to be dictated to them stylistically, joylessly drifting from one contested twenty-footer to another. Watching the team struggle — both to win games and to forge an identity — it’s impossible not to notice the looming presence of fatigue.
You’re going to hear the “f” word a lot this season, which is a natural function of the compressed season and the media’s inability to use a thesaurus (see: Republican candidates’ “surges,” etc.). Of course, it’s not wrong to point out the effect that this marathon of a sprint of a season will have on players’ physically and emotionally. But in the case of the Magic, the fatigue imposed by the schedule is dwarfed by the fatigue that will come from playing through the Howard media maelstrom, as the franchise faces the risk of buckling under the tremendous weight of scrutiny they will face every night.
As other fan bases have found out all too recently, every win or loss is filtered through the context of the “will he or won’t he” game that will drive the season narrative. In a league like the NBA, where fans spend as much time cataloguing draft picks, trades and pipe dreams as they do box scores, that constant speculation has the potential to render the actual game results meaningless. The Magic are thus confronting fatigue on two different fronts, and their first games have shown how they might combat or succumb to it.
A prayer for the NBA season
Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
It’s about that time, y’all.
The Magic have been in the middle of a media storm for a month now, and will have the focus all to themselves now that the Chris Paul saga has finally reached its end. What there is to say about this team — that is, what we know before the games start — we’ve mostly said. And that’s how it should be.
We saw two fairly different teams in the preseason, one of which seemed prepared to fold under the uncertainty and tiresomeness of the season, and one of which seemed prepared to fight to remind people of their ability. So I thought, on this, the eve of the eve of the Christmas my family finally jettisons me for watching basketball all day, I would offer up my biggest hope for the season.
I have not always been an NBA fan. Where I’m from in North Carolina, the ACC comes first and then next season’s recruits come second. The Hornets broke our hearts by leaving, and the Bobcats have always had trouble gaining traction. Two teams brought me around to the league — the 2004 Pistons and the 2009 Magic.
The Pistons I fell for as they laid waste to the favored Lakers, staying up late my freshman year in high school and marveling at their sheer personality flaunting their now-fabled lack of star power and rehabilitated Rasheed, who will always be one of my very favorite players.
The Magic were a slightly different phenomenon. I’d been an NBA fan for a few years, and watched games pretty regularly. On the night I fell for the Magic, I was watching a game after the Christmas break with my friend Seth. Seth and I, when it comes to basketball, don’t agree about anything. He favors a pick-up aesthetic, and his favorite players are guys like Monta Ellis, while I had by this time dabbled enough in advanced metrics to favor efficiency and balance. I can’t even remember what exactly happened in the game, but we’d been quietly watching a Magic game — against the Hawks, I think — when Seth and I looked at each other and said something like “Nobody plays that pretty.”
The Magic’s bench needs to improve
Photo by Fernando Medina/NBAE
I sat down with the task of writing about the Orlando player who most needs to redeem himself, but frankly, I just can’t do it.
As far as the major players on the roster, there just isn’t much sense in talking about “redemption.” We know Dwight’s situation. We’ve covered the bejeezus in the past out of Hedo’s slippage, and while I know Nate disagrees, I think his play suggests not so much the need for him to redeem himself as it does the fact that he ain’t that good anymore. Jameer has proven himself steady, with one outlier season of excellence. Jason Richardson is an aging leaper, and Glen Davis’ struggles weren’t really on the Magic and also I’m tired of talking about him, too.
You see what I’m saying? Most of the roster on this team has a floor and a ceiling that are about exactly the same. However, when you start looking at the reserves, you notice that how little contribution the Magic got last year from certified role players whose names aren’t Ryan Anderson. And so, while the failures of last season aren’t exactly on their heads, I think the players who most need to step it up this year are J.J. Redick, Chris Duhon and Earl Clark.
One of the best things about Van Gundy Ball is that the team system is able to absorb players with fairly limited skill sets and ask them to perform roles which accentuate their abilities, which allows the team to put players on the court who bring definable positive skill sets to their position at all times. This is a sharp contrast to an approach of trying to “steal minutes” — when Magic reserves are on the court, ideally, they are put in a role where their abilities are accentuated much more than their weaknesses are masked. In 2010, and even the season before that, this was often the case, but last season, the bench was populated with players either performing well below their career averages or failing to cultivate the one skill they could use to change a game.
Clark is a perfect example of the latter case, and the largest enigma currently on the roster.
Player to watch: Stephen Curry
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Magic Basketball previews the 2011-2012 NBA season with a look at the players we’re most excited to watch this year.
When Eddy asked me to think of a player I was most excited to watch, my mind immediately went to every player on the Thunder roster. But — curses! — Nate beat me to it with his killer piece on Tuesday on James Harden, the league’s pre-eminent beard.
I realized I’m tired of talking about Ryan Anderson, even though I’m really stoked for his season, and tired of hearing how excited everyone is for Ricky Rubio. And then I wanted to write about one of the players involved in these mega trade rumors, but I realized that those are being covered so exhaustively that even thinking the name Chris Paul triggers some sort of trauma-induced narcolepsyasdfjasfmcea.ddffll. See? Like that. It just happened.
In trying to think about who I was excited about this year, I was forced to stare into the new Twitter-created attention abyss, wherein everything about the NBA is so rapidly transmitted, commented upon and digested that anything exciting is ground into a mealy pulp of commentary within minutes. For those of you scoring metaphors at home, I just said that Twitter has turned the NBA into a chasm of boring oatmeal — everything in today’s news cycle happens so fast that you can’t be surprised by anything, and everything fresh about the league is so quickly overexposed that it becomes stale.
Even the rookies, for God’s sake: I already know how Rubio struggles with his shot, I already know about Derrick Williams’ problems as a “tweener” (there’s a word I would banish from English) and I know how Jan Vesely’s girlfriend kisses and what every basketball writer I follow thinks about that.
I realized I was struggling to dredge up excitement because I have a hard time imagining being surprised any more. And then, somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind, I thought: “Stephen Curry.”
Stan Van Gundy and the future of the Magic
Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
Usually when a team realizes the axe is hanging over their current era, one of the first questions that circulates is about the coaching. So far, though, as perhaps you’ve noticed, the spotlight has been on Dwight Howard and almost nothing else. Perhaps this is because the Magic are in sort of a bizarre situation with Stan Van Gundy, by all reasonable accounts a top five coach whose teams perennially overachieve but whose lack of mystical machismo or good suits has led to his being underappreciated.
We know two things, though: the Magic will be a completely different team within a year’s time, and it would be pure lunacy not to have SVG usher the team through the transition. Because it is fun to think about things like this, and because it is instructive to examine the coaching situation to figure out how the Magic will operate, I want to imagine what a rebuilding team helmed by SVG would look like.
At his only other professional head coaching stop, Van Gundy took over a Heat team that was in a weird place. This was before Dwyane Wade was really Dwyane Wade (who, despite a strong postseason, posted just a 17.6 PER on the year), and what little talent the Heat had meshed so poorly the team had won 25 games the year before. In Van Gundy’s first year, the Heat — just to recap, with a rookie star and only one other player whose PER was higher than 17 — won 42 games and gave the team with most wins in the league, the Pacers, a bear of a second round series. This is Van Gundy’s most “rebuilding” year and, given that the Heat were just two seasons away from a title afterward, I think it’s safe to call it an unmitigated success.
As the coach of the Magic, Van Gundy has demonstrated two things that I think would make him an ideal coach for a rebuilding team: a commitment to defense, and a willingness to play unorthodox ball to cater to his players’ strengths and limitations. Young players (remember those?) were developed as role players and given increased responsibilities as their skills developed, and under Van Gundy, this development has been rapid. Think about the fact that Courtney Lee went from being a non-lottery pick who was a spot player to having a play drawn up for him to beat the Lakers in the Finals — this is a coach who knows how to bring players along while negotiating their growing abilities and roles. You can see this time and again in Orlando, and nowhere more clearly than with Dwight Howard.
Embracing uncertainty
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
There’s not a good way to introduce this season for the Magic, because you already know all the things that one might say. The elephant in the room has been trumpeting his trunk for three seasons now, and the second we heard that a new CBA was forthcoming, Orlando became one of the four or so franchises most under the microscope for the coming season.
It feels like Orlando can’t win. For years, despite having a perennial MVP candidate, one of the best and most innovative coaches around, and now the NBA’s best arena, Magic fans have felt like the team has been overlooked. And now that the team has the spotlight, the scrutiny is mostly about the roster’s shortcomings and the increasing probability that Dwight Howard will be plying his wares elsewhere next season.
Now check it, y’all: I have nothing new to say about Dwight Howard, and I may not for a long time. But it’s looking like a season of worry and tooth-gnashing for Orlando, and while I don’t want to trivialize how much is at stake for the franchise, I am here to say that we just ought not sweat it.
Post-lockout, I feel like a dude on the rebound after a bad breakup. I been burned. I learned a few things about love I hadn’t thought about before. (Disclosure: I am coming to you live and direct drinking a Manhattan and blaring Sam Cooke right now.) I just spent months watching the owners — men whose businesses I devote an outsize proportion of my time and resources to following — behave as if they simply did not care whether basketball happened. It’s not news that money makes the world and the league go ‘round, but what I’m saying is I’m having a hard time reinvesting in the league in the exact same way. Me and the NBA are going to go out a couple times, I’ll focus on the positives, and we’ll see during the playoffs if it will be love again.
I don’t mean to be saying I won’t follow or be invested in the league this year, I’m just determined to understand its goings-on within the proper frame of reference: as parts of a pure entertainment system, with little of the seriousness that would inspire real angst about where Dwight is going. I would like him on the Magic for his career, sure. I’d like it even better if he was kept on the Magic by means of a daring trade that brought another top-tier player to the Magic. And those things might happen.
But whereas last season I might’ve gotten annoyed with the trade speculation or the fact that countless observers who’ve been ignoring the Magic’s good features for years will now be talking about their shortcomings, this year I’m the prettiest girl at the prom. Every fun scenario for the future of the league involves the team we’ve been following for years, and while in the short term the Magic may get less competitive, it’s harder to imagine a scenario with so many rich possibilities.
One of the things that has driven me the craziest about the Magic the past few seasons — ever since the trade for Vince Carter, really — was the high-quality limbo in which the team has been floating. I believe pretty firmly that whatever the result of this season is, rooting for the Magic is going to be more fun that it was last year. Perhaps we’ll get to watch an extremely young team of high draft picks, perhaps we’ll see Dwight paired with a similarly talented player. What we almost certainly won’t be seeing, God willing, is a team of high-priced veterans whose skills we are already sure of and don’t fit any sort of team identity.
So instead of sweating the devil I know — that extremely frustrating, ill-conceived devil whose limitations I’m acutely aware of — I’m going spend the season embracing the devil I don’t.
What went wrong for the Orlando Magic, Part II
Photo by Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images
The rise and fall of the Orlando Magic as an elite team and championship contender will be examined by Magic Basketball in a two-part series — here’s Part II.
As the Magic continue to face their uncertain near-future, I’m thinking about something I imagine a lot of us are: John Milton. Specifically, I’m thinking about Paradise Lost, his account of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. It seems to me that Magic nation probably feels how Adam and Eve did shortly after God exposed the whole apple/fig leaf-clothing fiasco: “We had it all, and we blew it somehow, and now we need to figure out who to blame. Also, I hate snakes.” Yeah, verily, fellow Magic watchers, we have dined on the ambrosia of celestial basketball, have stared lovingly into the pond at our reflections as Eve did, contemplating how nice it was to be a perennial contender. And now we must make our way into the less hospitable basketball wilderness, to try and figure out how to reclaim that divinity.
There is a strain of criticism in Paradise Lost readers that says that Adam and Eve did us all a solid by getting kicked out of Eden–their screw-up, basically, gave us life as we know it. It’s a pleasant take on the notion of original sin, usually called the fortunate fall. By sinning their way out of Eden, Adam and Eve became people, and exposed the rest of the race to all the goods and bads that come with the territory. For the Magic, our fortunate fall was Rashard Lewis.
You remember that sign-and-trade. The Magic were getting a 27-year-old inside/outside player, the Sonics’ career leader in three-pointers, a player who had scored more than 20 points per game for three straight seasons and was coming of a career high in that department. Of the trade, Stan Van Gundy said, ”It really makes our roster very, very good. And even more than that, what this says to me and what our organization has done with Rashard shows me and should show everyone out there how committed this organization is to winning and winning a championship.”
Magic Basketball Weekly: Sloths and the Nuggets
Sloths are my favorite animal. They have been for years. Science has shown them to be both the cutest and most bro-some of all God’s creatures. Let me hit you with some sloth facts: They grow moss on them, because they chill so hard. Sometimes, if their babies fall out of a tree or something, they just completely let it slide, because getting out of your tree would harsh everybody’s vibe.
Once, when I was at a party, this completely awesome bro came up and asked a group of my friends — he was totally earnest, and even seemed a little bit worried — if he was chilling too hard. Sloths are the James Joyce of chilling too hard. They have stretched the art form of chilling to its natural limit, and have achieved a sort of referendum on the very idea of chilling at all.
So, naturally, when I saw this adorable sloth documentary popping up on every girl I know’s Facebook wall, I was thrilled, right? Wrong. I am not looking forward to adorably disgusting sloths becoming the new lolcat. I do not want to see a bunch of sorostitutes capering about with their sloth desktop backgrounds, or see a million “Daily Cute” Twitter blasts with pictures of sloths. Keep your pandas, internet cutesy people. Take your otters. But leave me my sloths. I liked them before you. I was the first person to appreciate the cuteness of mossy, negligent animal parents. That’s right, I’m hipster trolling you about sloths. I was into them when, like, nobody knew who they were, and you’re just about to get their sell-out album.
Which is exactly how I feel about the Denver Nuggets. Listen, the Nuggets are adorable. They have a young, small point guard and an old sort of fat one who would make an excellent buddy cop movie. They have a cleaner-shaven, European Val Kilmer playing small forward. Ty Lawson and Kenneth Faried even sort of look like sloths (come with me on this, I’m not taking no for an answer). And they play such fun basketball. Oh god, they’re so fun. And, like sloths, the whole world is waking up to how awesome the Nuggets are. I’m not happy about it.
I’m not happy about the Nuggets becoming one of the hot topics for the season. Do I want to hear people for eight months yelling about how, if you adjust for pace, their defense is way better than conventional wisdom suggests? I do not. Do I want to read advanced shooting percentage breakdowns that take into account the Denver altitude? I do not. I want them to keep being the only team my girlfriend likes — because she likes the word “Nugget” and pronounces Nene’s name “ninny.” I want them to continue to play 40 players every game. I do not want their glorious ragtag weirdness to be scrutinized for effectiveness by every corner of punditry; I just want to let them keep being rad.
Like sloths, it is up in the air whether the Nuggets are the most “effective” animal when it comes to keeping your babies in trees or winning playoff games, but also like sloths, the Nuggets are willing to continue being awesome regardless. So the Nuggets are like sloths. I hear what you’re saying, though: “But the Nuggets are fast, and sloths are slow!” And to you I say, shut up. This is important to me.
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