Regular Season Game 19: Golden State Warriors (4-16) at Orlando Magic (7-11) - 6pm ET

[MagicStarwipe]

Me when the Vuc and Fournier arguments finally end...

[The Real Dalic]

And you’re pretending these numbers jump significantly or even to middle of the pack with them entirely.

Fine we can play that game-

Last season with the healthiest roster ever and Vuc/Ross playing out of their minds for fat contracts-

Off efficiency- 21st
Pace of play - 26th
TS% - 23rd
Effective fg %- 21st

So that’s still inefficient and near the bottom half of the league relying solely on defense to carry a playoff berth. This seasons statistics aren’t surprising at all.

wrong...literally right now the starting 5 is top 10 offense 5man lineup amongst lineups that have played at least 120 minutes together this year (aka 10 full quarters of sample size)

Lol. You say “wrong” about facts on last seasons offensive statistics on a full season of healthy data after crying about the sample size...then you post a 12 game sample size against a cupcake schedule. What a joke as usual.

The joke is actually you misquoting him. He said the bench was bringing the whole teams numbers down and asked you to show the lineups with Fournier and Vuc in them. All you did was showed our ratings from last season for some reason.

[ezzzp]

Lol. You say “wrong” about facts on last seasons offensive statistics on a full season of healthy data after crying about the sample size...then you post a 12 game sample size against a cupcake schedule. What a joke as usual.

Uh last year post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense. That was with Fournier having a career worst season. As usual, totally clueless.

[The Real Dalic]

wrong...literally right now the starting 5 is top 10 offense 5man lineup amongst lineups that have played at least 120 minutes together this year (aka 10 full quarters of sample size)

Just so everyone is clear here...

You believe that the Magic would have a top 10-15 offense if they had better bench players?

Lol.


Blame the offense on literally anything except for the broken system that we’ve seen time and time again. Classic. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is the argument I never get, why do people yell at Vuc and Fournier (with some people cheering on when they get injured) when it's not their fault the system is the way that it is?

Also, I'm not for trading Isaac and Fultz as they are clearly our future with Isaac being our best player in my opinion. But let's be real, if AG, Fultz, and Isaac were much better shooters, specifically AG and Fultz, we'e be a much more dangerous offensive team. We only have 3 shooters on this team. Two of them come off the bench and have started off horribly from 3pt range.

There's no space due to the lack of shooters and everyone just packs the paint against us. There's no doubt in my mind we're missing a true number one option (I believe Fultz can be that if he continues improving and fixes his 3pt shot,) but Vuc and Fournier have been doing a fantastic job with the trash offensive teammates they have around them. We mostly have defensive specialists around those two and it's not working in terms of offense and we even dropped off defensively so far this year.

[ezzzp]

Lol.


Blame the offense on literally anything except for the broken system that we’ve seen time and time again. Classic. You can’t make this stuff up.

Last year post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense.

What's classic is how uninformed that comment is.

[MagicMatic]

wrong...literally right now the starting 5 is top 10 offense 5man lineup amongst lineups that have played at least 120 minutes together this year (aka 10 full quarters of sample size)

Lol. You say “wrong” about facts on last seasons offensive statistics on a full season of healthy data after crying about the sample size...then you post a 12 game sample size against a cupcake schedule. What a joke as usual.

The joke is actually you misquoting him. He said the bench was bringing the whole teams numbers down and asked you to show the lineups with Fournier and Vuc in them. All you did was showed our ratings from last season for some reason.

And ?

It’s a joke argument either way. So what then? We are actually a top 10 offense because the bench is poor? or a 12 game sample size against inferior competition is an accurate representation vs an entire season worth of data.

And maybe you should go further back in the thread and notice that it was initially about making the claim that the offensive ranking is poor altogether. Hence the point and has nothing to do with the pairing. Who cares about the pairing? It’s an arbitrary argument. The entire offense systematically is bad and last seasons statistics show that. You have an obvious pro -Vuc bias either way so maybe stick to making your own point instead of entering the convo lacking anything substantial.

[MagicMatic]

Lol.


Blame the offense on literally anything except for the broken system that we’ve seen time and time again. Classic. You can’t make this stuff up.

Last year post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense.

What's classic is how uninformed that comment is.

All I did was post an entire seasons statistics worth of data for the offensive rankings and you can’t handle it.

Oh so now the goal posts moved to “post as break” huh?? Interesting. So you mean the easiest part of the schedule and where we played a bunch of top tier teams without their best players during a good stretch of games? Yeah, let’s use that specific data...

[MagicStarwipe]

You can make any argument you want. Some people are just sick of this team and want Vuc and Fournier gone. No need to start World War 3 over it.

You see other teams with their go to players... Harden, Lillard, Curry, Davis, Kawhi, PG, Booker, Doncic, Beal... on and on and on. But people want to start board wars because some of us aren't content with having Vuc and Fournier as our cornerstones for a frickin decade and are sick of watching it. It's great that it doesn't bother you guys much. Good for you. Others have a different opinion. Get over it.

[The Real Dalic]

Lol. You say “wrong” about facts on last seasons offensive statistics on a full season of healthy data after crying about the sample size...then you post a 12 game sample size against a cupcake schedule. What a joke as usual.

The joke is actually you misquoting him. He said the bench was bringing the whole teams numbers down and asked you to show the lineups with Fournier and Vuc in them. All you did was showed our ratings from last season for some reason.

And ?

It’s a joke argument either way. So what then? We are actually a top 10 offense because the bench is poor? or a 12 game sample size against inferior competition is an accurate representation vs an entire season worth of data.

And maybe you should go further back in the thread and notice that it was initially about making the claim that the offensive ranking is poor altogether. Hence the point and has nothing to do with the pairing. Who cares about the pairing? It’s an arbitrary argument. The entire offense systematically is bad and last seasons statistics show that. You have an obvious pro -Vuc bias either way so maybe stick to making your own point instead of entering the convo lacking anything substantial.

Very respectful response.

Regardless, I guess I'm "pro -Vuc" because so many posters are wrongfully so Anti-Vuc around here even though the guy was an All-Star and wants to be here unlike every other All-Star before. All the problems on this team are far from his fault and he just does his best every game to help mitigate those problems. People just like pointing the finger at him because he's the best player on the team. The problem is that he is the best player on this team, but that's not his fault, it's the front offices. Blame them, not him.

[ezzzp]

The joke is actually you misquoting him. He said the bench was bringing the whole teams numbers down and asked you to show the lineups with Fournier and Vuc in them. All you did was showed our ratings from last season for some reason.

And ?

It’s a joke argument either way. So what then? We are actually a top 10 offense because the bench is poor? or a 12 game sample size against inferior competition is an accurate representation vs an entire season worth of data.

And maybe you should go further back in the thread and notice that it was initially about making the claim that the offensive ranking is poor altogether. Hence the point and has nothing to do with the pairing. Who cares about the pairing? It’s an arbitrary argument. The entire offense systematically is bad and last seasons statistics show that. You have an obvious pro -Vuc bias either way so maybe stick to making your own point instead of entering the convo lacking anything substantial.

Wrong again.

Last year post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense. That was with Fournier having a career worst season.

In addition, the starting 5 also ranked high in ORTG in first few months of the season last year (from Oct-Dec: 115.0 ORTG with Iwundu / 108.4 with Isaac). It was the bench dragging down the team's ORTG...once the bench improved, the overall team ORTG shot up.

[ezzzp]

Lol.


Blame the offense on literally anything except for the broken system that we’ve seen time and time again. Classic. You can’t make this stuff up.

Last year post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense.

What's classic is how uninformed that comment is.

All I did was post an entire seasons statistics worth of data for the offensive rankings and you can’t handle it.

Oh so now the goal posts moved to “post as break” huh?? Interesting. So you mean the easiest part of the schedule and where we played a bunch of top tier teams without their best players during a good stretch of games? Yeah, let’s use that specific data...

Wrong yet again.

The starting 5 also ranked high in ORTG from Oct-Dec last year (115.0 ORTG with Iwundu / 108.4 with Isaac). It was the bench dragging down the team's ORTG...once the bench improved, the overall team ORTG shot up.

That's why post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense.

You are the one that can't handle the facts.

[The Real Dalic]

You can make any argument you want. Some people are just sick of this team and want Vuc and Fournier gone. No need to start World War 3 over it.

You see other teams with their go to players... Harden, Lillard, Curry, Davis, Kawhi, PG, Booker, Doncic, Beal... on and on and on. But people want to start board wars because some of us aren't content with having Vuc and Fournier as our cornerstones for a frickin decade and are sick of watching it. It's great that it doesn't bother you guys much. Good for you. Others have a different opinion. Get over it.

Is this not a discussion board? Also, you act as if the positive people or the "Pro-Buddy Ball" group was the one starting this stuff. It's normally the negative posters and the Anti-Vuc and Fournier people that start all this stuff by never shutting up about it game after game, second after second, thread after thread. Talk about annoying.

People are gonna have to get over the fact that we'll be there to defend Vuc from the blame he doesn't deserve. I was initially done with Evan this season but I can longer say that as he's stepping up in big ways this season being one of only 3 players worth a damn right now between him, Isaac, and Fultz until Vuc gets back.

Meanwhile, with everyone bitching about Vuc and Fournier actually producing you don't hear much about AG being a G-League player all year.

[MagicMatic]

The joke is actually you misquoting him. He said the bench was bringing the whole teams numbers down and asked you to show the lineups with Fournier and Vuc in them. All you did was showed our ratings from last season for some reason.

And ?

It’s a joke argument either way. So what then? We are actually a top 10 offense because the bench is poor? or a 12 game sample size against inferior competition is an accurate representation vs an entire season worth of data.

And maybe you should go further back in the thread and notice that it was initially about making the claim that the offensive ranking is poor altogether. Hence the point and has nothing to do with the pairing. Who cares about the pairing? It’s an arbitrary argument. The entire offense systematically is bad and last seasons statistics show that. You have an obvious pro -Vuc bias either way so maybe stick to making your own point instead of entering the convo lacking anything substantial.

Very respectful response.

Regardless, I guess I'm "pro -Vuc" because so many posters are wrongfully so Anti-Vuc around here even though the guy was an All-Star and wants to be here unlike every other All-Star before. All the problems on this team are far from his fault and he just does his best every game to help mitigate those problems. People just like pointing the finger at him because he's the best player on the team. The problem is that he is the best player on this team, but that's not his fault, it's the front offices. Blame them, not him.

I don’t blame Vuc. I blame the system. Unfortunately, Vuc is a large part of the current system and it simply isn’t effective despite how hard people are trying to spin the narrative that it is. Which I find comical.

The point it that I don’t believe this team becomes successful offensively without true upgrades to the roster and system in which they play. Neither of those things happen out of nowhere. Not only that, but it never made sense to keep cycling through players that fit next to Vuc, rather than building something sustainable moving forward.

[SOUL]

Meanwhile, with everyone bitching about Vuc and Fournier actually producing you don't hear much about AG being a G-League player all year.

I think that's because most people (including me) don't mind losing AG with Isaac playing like a beast and seeing how badly he's been playing this year. However, trading him @ his lowest value would be dumb, there's simply not much to debate.

[MagicStarwipe]

You can make any argument you want. Some people are just sick of this team and want Vuc and Fournier gone. No need to start World War 3 over it.

You see other teams with their go to players... Harden, Lillard, Curry, Davis, Kawhi, PG, Booker, Doncic, Beal... on and on and on. But people want to start board wars because some of us aren't content with having Vuc and Fournier as our cornerstones for a frickin decade and are sick of watching it. It's great that it doesn't bother you guys much. Good for you. Others have a different opinion. Get over it.

Is this not a discussion board? Also, you act as if the positive people or the "Pro-Buddy Ball" group was the one starting this stuff. It's normally the negative posters and the Anti-Vuc and Fournier people that start all this stuff by never shutting up about it game after game, second after second, thread after thread. Talk about annoying.

People are gonna have to get over the fact that we'll be there to defend Vuc from the blame he doesn't deserve. I was initially done with Evan this season but I can longer say that as he's stepping up in big ways this season being one of only 3 players worth a damn right now between him, Isaac, and Fultz until Vuc gets back.

Meanwhile, with everyone bitching about Vuc and Fournier actually producing you don't hear much about AG being a G-League player all year.

I suggest you go back and see who started the back and forth in this thread with an inflammatory post.

The whole board has called out Gordon for playing like crap this season so not sure what you're talking about there.

Anyway, I'm over it. This team isn't worth getting all worked up about anymore. We used to have guys like Shaq, Penny, T-Mac, Dwight. We used to have high standards.

[MagicMatic]

Last year post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense.

What's classic is how uninformed that comment is.

All I did was post an entire seasons statistics worth of data for the offensive rankings and you can’t handle it.

Oh so now the goal posts moved to “post as break” huh?? Interesting. So you mean the easiest part of the schedule and where we played a bunch of top tier teams without their best players during a good stretch of games? Yeah, let’s use that specific data...

Wrong yet again.

The starting 5 also ranked high in ORTG from Oct-Dec last year (115.0 ORTG with Iwundu / 108.4 with Isaac). It was the bench dragging down the team's ORTG...once the bench improved, the overall team ORTG shot up.

That's why post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense.

Ok ez”wrong”zp. Vuc and Fournier are the future. We need to upgrade the bench and we are a contender. This is all based on last years data post all star break despite the seasons statistics offensively telling the whole story and this season being almost last in every category. Cool story.

[SOUL]

Just so everyone is clear here...

You believe that the Magic would have a top 10-15 offense if they had better bench players?

Lol.


Blame the offense on literally anything except for the broken system that we’ve seen time and time again. Classic. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is the argument I never get, why do people yell at Vuc and Fournier (with some people cheering on when they get injured) when it's not their fault the system is the way that it is?

Also, I'm not for trading Isaac and Fultz as they are clearly our future with Isaac being our best player in my opinion. But let's be real, if AG, Fultz, and Isaac were much better shooters, specifically AG and Fultz, we'e be a much more dangerous offensive team. We only have 3 shooters on this team. Two of them come off the bench and have started off horribly from 3pt range.

There's no space due to the lack of shooters and everyone just packs the paint against us. There's no doubt in my mind we're missing a true number one option (I believe Fultz can be that if he continues improving and fixes his 3pt shot,) but Vuc and Fournier have been doing a fantastic job with the trash offensive teammates they have around them. We mostly have defensive specialists around those two and it's not working in terms of offense and we even dropped off defensively so far this year.

It's mostly because people act like Vuc has had some great offense all these years, he hasn't. It was great last year. That's it. Before that, he had good years, and then years where for how many shots he took, it was inefficient and quite frankly, bad. Because we are using his above average passing for a center more, he is shooting more threes, and got to the line a bit more too, we are reaping those benefits. Before that, it was long twos, not many free throws, and we didn't even use his passing often either. It's like people forget why we drafted Bamba in the first place, people really thought that was our biggest area of need besides point guard which went out the window once Trae was drafted.

But it did take around 8 years for Vuc to grow into a multi-faceted, new age center, and we may never have saw it if Clifford didn't use him the way he did.

Fournier on offense would be really reliable one year, and then dip back down to mid 35s three point shooting and have games where he scored 4-10 points, plus he was not good last year. Extending him if he continues this great year is just as much of a coin toss as giving Ross an extension

They aren't the cause of this being a bad offense, the system is. And obviously the bench has been an issue for the last 8 years tbh, but people are acting like we haven't really traded away everybody else to try to fit them into this offense and nothing has ever worked until we got in a groove late last year. Also acquiring said "star" scorer to turn this team around WOULD require giving away Isaac, Fultz, picks, etc, because nobody else really has that sort of value on the team, sans Gordon maybe when he isn't inside of his own head and playing like crap.

Isaac's "bad" offense which needs improved shooting in his third year better than Vuc's offense for three entire years before his all-star season, and maybe even better than his years before that, I haven't compared them yet but..

2017-2018 Vuc (7th season) vs Isaac 3rd year, this year (17 games)

Isaac has been higher in TS%, FT rate, STL%, BLK%, 8% less usage, WS/48, (not calculating total WS since Vuc played 57 games that season and Isaac's only at 17), ORTG, DRTG, DBPM, BPM.

So again, why is it a stretch for people to want to build around Isaac but not around Vuc? Not even talking about on offense either,
I wouldn't built around Isaac on offense, just feature him as a 3rd option that also plays great defense, at least until he feels more comfortable on offense. Nobody has refuted me on this yet.

And like Knightro said, you do have to take steps back sometimes to move forward, especially if the product has been mostly the same the last however many years. When does it stop? 4 more years? Are we really going to act like Vuc's offense has been like it was his All-Star year and try to apply it previously? Because it wasn't.

[thelead]

I can totally envision Vuc and Evan beating LeBron and AD in the finals if we just had 3 great bench players... lol...

They aren’t a problem until you take salary into consideration. The way Evan is playing, we’re going to be spending almost half of the cap on those two players alone.

And for what it’s worth, I’d rather keep Evan and use Vuc’s cap space better.

[SOUL]

It's less a debate about the players and more of a moral philosophy of "they're the best we've got, so let's keep them" versus "well, we gave them 5-6 years, we seem to be capped, let's move on". If there was a way to move on, keep both players, adjust the pecking order a bit to where we could somehow build a dynamic offense around an actual offensive star and win, I'm for it. That just seems like a pipe dream though.

We maybe could've done it if we got lucky and drafted Doncic last year, but we won too many stupid games down the stretch to help our position.

[ezzzp]

All I did was post an entire seasons statistics worth of data for the offensive rankings and you can’t handle it.

Oh so now the goal posts moved to “post as break” huh?? Interesting. So you mean the easiest part of the schedule and where we played a bunch of top tier teams without their best players during a good stretch of games? Yeah, let’s use that specific data...

Wrong yet again.

The starting 5 also ranked high in ORTG from Oct-Dec last year (115.0 ORTG with Iwundu / 108.4 with Isaac). It was the bench dragging down the team's ORTG...once the bench improved, the overall team ORTG shot up.

That's why post A-S break the Magic were the 9th ranked offense. From January 1st to the end of the season they were the 15th ranked offense.

Ok ez”wrong”zp. Vuc and Fournier are the future. We need to upgrade the bench and we are a contender. This is all based on last years data post all star break despite the seasons statistics offensively telling the whole story and this season being almost last in every category. Cool story.

Ok magic"never-right"matic.

Vuc and Fournier are two key assets. Nobody knows the future. What we do know is that this roster will NOT be the same in a couple years because contracts and the salary cap exist. That is all based on legal realities.

Only a person who is totally uninformed about NBA and its contract reality would make such a foolish sarcastic statement like "the future" is player that can literally opt out of his contract in a few months and another whose contract ends before Fultz and Isaac even enter their prime ascent.

Also, you are wrong yet again...the lineup stats account for the entire year.