So I have thought about doing this a few times since lately we've seen more "Full Highlights" video showing up on YouTube, but it's a bit more time/labor intensive than I generally am willing to put in. However, for the frist game in the season, I figured I'd go for it. I'm still not going to worry about presentation much, but rather just making the data readable and putting it out there for everyone.

I wanted to really look at the defensive breakdowns the Magic had against the Heat.

I started by pulling up the "Full Highlights" video of the game...which is almost 10 min long, and shows 44 of Miami's 47 made field goals in the game:

Then I went through this video, and watched every play. I tried to find the most glaring "mistake" by the Magic defense on the play, and listed it on a spreadsheet:

Ignore the "Miami" part...it was easier to track by simply listing every clip, which included Orlando's clips, then I filtered those out. This was about the Magic defense, so I didn't care about their scores.

The names that crop up the most here are Green and Ibaka.

That said, Ibaka's numbers get inflated a bit because he has several mentions where he wasn't the primary problem and simply wasn't able to totally clean up the mistakes of others. To some extent, that's why the Magic signed up, so it's worth mentioning, but several of those look like things that will likely be cleaned up as chemistry grows.

Green not only gets mentioned the most, he also has some of the most egregious mistakes on the page. Mulitple times he was beat one-on-one by pretty redimentary moves for a Miami player to get an easy look at the basket. On multiple dribble-handoff plays there seemed to be confusion about whether the chasing Magic player was going to go under the screen. They would try to chase the Heat player getting the handoff, but Green seemed to get up into his man to allow them to go under the screen -- the result was Green simply made the pick even more effective. Whoops. Green also, again on multiple occassions, simply didn't rotate over to "help the helper", leaving interior passes open for easy Heat buckets. He was also involved in a few of the worst PnR coverages, particularly looking like neither Magic player knew who was supposed to stay with the roll man.

Admittedly, on some of these it could have been the "other" Magic players' fault, not Green. However, he also had some really lazy plays and on one of the PnR failures he raised his hand to take responsbility for the mistake -- so when other sitautions happen that were similar, I tend to think it was his fault.

Ibaka and Vucevic both had issues with hanging back a little too far, and/or not challenging shots as well as they should have.

Payton ball watched a few times and lost his man. That can't happen.

Augustin did the same thing, but also was just a bit...well, what we expected.

Fournier was aight most of the time. He got beat a few times, but nothing overly blatent. He racked up several mistakes in the 4th Q, likely while forcing his play a bit in hopes of getting the Magic back into the game.

Gordon had a couple mistakes, but nothing stood out as too bad.

Hezonja was surprisingly absent from the mistakes. Most of the time he was "out of the play" on the defensive end, as the Heat's offense didn't get anywhere near him. I will note that he didn't look overly engaged, and didn't "put a body" on guys which might have upset some of the Heat's offensive timing.

Welp, that covers everyone that played.

Conclusion?

I'd say that Ibaka needs to get a bit sharper, but being a focal point of the defense that lacks cohesion overall makes the "clean up" work he is expected to do even harder. Both he and Vucevic need to be better at hanging back "the right amount" to be able to stop drives but also contest shots.

The guards (Payton, Augustin, Fournier) need to do a better job of staying aware of off-ball movement from their man. This I could imagine getting better in time, though. Learning a new system and learning to trust the defensive scheme can sometimes lead to ball and team-watching. I'll call out Payton here more than Augustin, because let's face it, it's more important for Payton to not screw up defensively, since he's the starter.

Thumbs up for Gordon.

Hezonja needs to be more engaged, even if the play isn't directly involving him. Bumping guys, moving in-and-out of passing lanes, and always "being ready" in case the play does move towards him...all these "little things" are important to build into habits.

Green. Oh, Jeff Green. With a combination of the most mistakes with some of the worst ones, it's clear to see why he has never broken out as a star player. Basically, unless he's having one of his "offensive explosion" nights (which are inconstent and infrequent) he's basically a minus on the floor. It's probably tolerable if he's playing against backups, at least for ~20mpg or something...but when he's forced to play serious minutes, it's gonna be rough. I'd argue that his poor defensive showing in this game was a large contributing factor to the loss.

Hopefully these guys can continue to improve and tighten things up, and I'd say that in most cases I suspect they will to some extent. Also, the addition of Biyombo will reduce Green's minutes. Best case is if Hezonja starts to get his act together, who I'm sure Vogel would rather play at the 3 and move Gordon to the 4...but he can't do it yet, given the lackluster preseason and start for Hezonja.