Orlando Magic training camp is now open and the team will have to answer several serious questions to accomplish their lofty goals.
The Orlando Magic opened training camp Saturday with a focus on defense and trying to bring an attention to detail. It was a fresh look at the season from a new coach with new expectations and new goals.
The storylines seem pretty played out. The team needs to turn the corner. It needs to gain identity and accountability. It needs to grow up.
The baseline for all of it is going to get laid out in training camp and practice. Scott Skiles is going to set his vision for the team in the coming weeks as the Magic prepare for the regular season to begin at the end of October.
It is going to be a bit of a building process. There will be fits and starts for sure and a lot of learning coming from the young roster. This is their first time for many of them, certainly with the Magic, having the expectation.
The lucky this is that many Magic players during Friday’s Media Day stated the same. They believed too that they needed to turn the corner. They seemed more determined than ever to make that happen.
Skiles has a lot on his plate as camp begins.
The first thing he has to do, it seems, is establish an identity. Skiles said that identity will likely come on the defensive end. That is a principle and a mentality that has been established in all of his teams. He spent a lot of his first practice Saturday working on defensive details.
It was noticeable for the Magic in the first day of practice. They all talked about the level of precision and intention Skiles brought to his practice. It helped focus them to accomplish certain goals.
Last year, the Orlando Magic talked a lot about identity. They wanted to be a certain kind of team and failed to achieve it. That again helps with the focus and mentality and responsibility the Magic and its budding leaders feel.
That will be another storyline to watch for the Magic. This is still a young team and someone has to step up into a leadership role. That goes both for leading by example and also in bringing other players up.
Scott Skiles said he will leadership develop naturally and it is not something that can be forced or developed in one day. Everyone right now is picking each other up and pushing each other with the excitement of the season here.
The final piece to the Magic turning the corner is something Tobias Harris has harped most on — consistency.
This Magic team is extremely talented. They are more than capable of winning games. They have scored plenty of upsets. And someone on this roster it would seem is capable and ready to step up into at least quasi-stardom.
But the problem with the Magic last year especially was consistency. It was hard to tell what kind of team would show up each night.
Throughout training camp, every player talked about ingraining into their identity a peskiness so teams would know they would be in for a fight every time they played Orlando. The Magic want to be known as a hard-working team and as a team who makes beating them difficult. That was not always the case last year.
Of course, it is one thing to say all these things and quite another to do it.
The Magic have a training camp to lay the foundations and push forward to make 2016 a success in their eyes and turn the corner on this rebuild to play competitive basketball.
