Choice quotes from this one.
Vic Mackey's fightin' Magicians are 5-1 since turning Victor Oladipo into a super-sub, a move team higher-ups discussed last season, league sources say.
So this may have been floating around the front office for a while.
Only the Warriors and Spurs, the league's two best teams right now, have put up fatter per-possession scoring margins since Thanksgiving.
Maybe it's temporary, but as far as temporary changes go, this one is pretty damn good.
The Frye-Nikola Vucevic duo is one of the best shooting frontcourts in the league, and Frye generally stays behind the arc -- sucking a big-man defender away from the rim.
This may become important in a minute.
Payton is getting more shots within the restricted area since the change, and he's draining 70 percent of them -- up from an ugly 43 percent before the lineup change.
Holy cow, that's a huge jump. I don't know if he's just being streaky, or more focused, or if it really was the floor spacing. Let's hope it continues!
Orlando's surge is about much more than Oladipo's new role, and there are reasons to worry it may not last. Oladipo and Payton are still playing together a ton: 16 minutes per game since the switch, down from about 22 per game before.
Only a 6 minute difference. Which goes back to the question I've been asking: is it really benching Oladipo, or is there more to it? Are Elfrid and Oladipo simply playing better individually after a slow start? Does it help to get things rolling early in the game and then let them close together in clutch time? Is it the rest of the team that's improved?
I'd love to see their on/off numbers together before and after the switch.
But the Frye-Vucevic combination has a long track record of awful defense, and the Magic in this stretch have faced mostly below-average offensive teams. Those teams have hit an icy 33 percent of wide-open 3-pointers, and they're getting a ton of those looks -- especially from the corners, where Orlando has allowed a league-high 9.3 attempts since the flip. What happens against better offenses?
This is exactly what we've been talking about the last 3 or 4 games. Are we playing with fire with all the 3s?
Frye and Vucevic have no shot chasing small-ball lineups on defense. Orlando could punish those groups on the other end, but they may have to slide Aaron Gordon or Oladipo back into Frye's slot -- and suffering some spacing crunch.
I still think this is the long-term plan.
On a simple level, the lineup change is about Evan Fournier emerging as a flat-out better option at 2-guard -- and better overall player -- than Oladipo. Critics slammed Rob Hennigan for "only" nabbing Fournier in exchange for Arron Afflalo on an expiring deal, but Hennigan did his diligence canvassing the league for better packages, and he understood how good Fournier could be.
He's longer than Oladipo, and a more sound defender. Oladipo is manic, and manic players always look like they are doing something on defense. But what he's really doing a lot of the time is hopping out of Orlando's scheme, and leaving a shooter open. Fournier sticks within the system, and he's more rugged than you'd think.
This is where he starts getting shaky with his analysis. I'm completely sympathetic to the idea that the eye test is misleading. I totally get that guys jumping all over the floor don't necessarily mean sound team defense.
And yet: Skiles has called Oladipo the team's best defender. His advanced defensive metrics look okay, though his simple on/off opponent DRtg isn't great. Evan is playing well on defense, sometimes even when out of position at the 3. It may be a contract year boost, and I don't think he's ever going to be a plus defender.
Skiles may be specifically targetting Oladipo's energy to disrupt what teams are trying to do at the point of attack. Probably won't work against sound veteran juggernauts, but that's okay.
Anyway, Zach Lowe was wrong about Evan -- he said in his contract extension piece that he'll never be a starter, and now he doesn't even bat an eye at it -- so we can't always take his player analysis at face value. But the rest of it seems interesting.
