Scott Skiles isn't working as a head coach, and Rob Hennigan should probably be canned before he abandons everything that got him to this point. Allow me to rant and vent below.
I've been asking myself the past several days if the team would look any different if Jacque Vaughn was still the coach of the Magic. My answer is, no, the record would probably be right about the same by the end of the season! While some players have managed to thrive under Skiles (Fournier especially, and to some extent Gordon), other players have completely stagnated or even regressed (Payton is the big offender here, but Vucevic and formerly Harris are also victims).
What exactly has Skiles brought to this team? Everything he was brought on to accomplish - strong team defense, a more coherent (if not simple) offense, and the experience necessary to win competitive games and make the playoffs as a competitive team - has been an abject failure. The defense has not fared much better this season, as the glaring holes that plague the interior defense continue to present themselves. The offense has been a complete mess even since the calendar flipped, relying almost exclusively on a duo of Oladipo and Fournier to provide any semblance of competitiveness to the team. Elfrid has become an unbelievable liability in the Skiles offense, which values team-oriented passing instead of a singular ball-handler, which then becomes moot anyway because the ball sticks when it hits Oladipo's hands, rendering Elfrid's singular skill completely ineffective.
Other players haven't fared any better and are horribly misused. Fournier plays the SF position, which is the most forgivable offense due to personnel, but it still provides a mismatch that Evan can't handle, since he's inconsistent on offense but always consistently a negative on defense. Tobias Harris was misused for the half-season he spent under Skiles, seeing down numbers in almost every aspect of his game because he too was relegated to the SF position to make room for the glut of PFs available. The guy that honestly SHOULD have been taking those SF minutes, Aaron Gordon, has spent almost his entire season playing PF and negating his incredible athleticism and instincts to properly defend both the perimeter and the paint. Frye is by far the most egregious offender of the misused players, as he was having a remarkable shooting season and playing unusually well defensively with Vucevic before Skiles inexplicably benched him and couldn't figure out how to use him better. More recently, as of this writing, we've seen Skiles play Oladipo 39+ minutes for FIVE STRAIGHT GAMES, all within seven days of one another. This is unacceptable for any player at any age.
This is all par for the course with Skiles, though. He's almost certainly one of the least player-friendly coaches in the NBA, because it's always been his vision and understanding of the game that comes first before he takes into account the personnel he has available. This is quite obviously evidenced by the fact that the team traded away a promising young player on an okay contract for two players Skiles believed would fit the only system he has trust in. This isn't how basketball should be played. Vaughn, for all of his miserable faults, at least made an effort to understand what he had available to him as a coach. Besides the Nicholson debacle in trying to force him into a three point shooting role, even though he was already highly effective in the post (which, in retrospect, was a vain attempt in creating a stretch four out of thin air since the team had no such player and needed one badly), Vaughn was able to recognize the strengths of his players and, in a sense, gave them opportunities to fix their weaknesses.
Given the natural progression of Oladipo and Gordon, I think I'd have to say that the team would be no better or worse if Vaughn was still coaching it! If nothing else, the continuity of maintaining the same leader between years would have counted for something, and since he was almost quite literally just as new at this whole head coaching thing as Oladipo was at this whole NBA thing, there was reason to believe his ability to understand the game would grow along with the young players.
But this all wraps up to ownership, and what the team expects from Hennigan. I'm not sure when it happened - it may have been the Vaughn dismissal, or perhaps it was when the team missed out on Porzingis, or even when the team traded away Harris for cap space - but Hennigan's agenda changed from building a brand new foundation in the Magic culture to keeping his job at all cost.
We all bought into it! So many of us have truly thought that this was the only way to compete, that this was the best way the team would get back to the glory days of Shaq and T-Mac and Dwight. This is what Hennigan spoon-fed us for the first three years, preaching about culture and sustainability and a winning foundation. And I'm sure he believed it too at the time! Not anymore, though. At this point, I suspect the only thing he believes in is his ability to keep his job.
It sucks because, all things considered, he's actually drafted pretty well! He HAS set up a good foundation for the future, and it really does just need a few pieces to be a good team. But outside of drafting, all of his personnel decisions have bombed. Currently, the two best players, talent-wise or prospect-wise, are Oladipo and Gordon, Hennigan's two highest draft picks. That's good! His trades have ultimately amounted to nothing, though. The Dwight blockbuster has effectively turned into Vucevic and Fournier, which are two decent players in a vacuum but pale in comparison to the collective talent that was traded around at the time. But okay, that one's not fair, because Dwight backed the team into a corner. All of his other trades have been largely ineffective as well, such as trading Redick (a guy who wanted to stay here his entire career) for Harris, who effectively turned into some jersey sales, a cool game-winning dunk, and cap space that the team will almost certainly botch. Anderson was, in retrospect, a bad trade. O'Quinn was, in all respects, a bad trade. The essential swap of Harkless-for-Napier was as ineffective and pointless as one could be.
That cap space I just mentioned is also an addition to what has essentially been a failure in free agency as well. Hennigan's biggest signing has been Harris, of whom the team had full rights to match and then traded him away anyway. Any big fish the team has tried to attract (such as Millsap) haven't bit. Every other signing has been, at best, an unremarkable journeyman who hasn't really contributed anything
But none of that should really matter if the foundation is solid, right? The team has some good foundational pieces that have been collected both from the draft and from liquidating assets - Oladipo, Fournier, Gordon, and Harris are good pieces to build upon. But Harris has been traded, shaking that foundation, in order to swing for the fences, which is the complete opposite of what Hennigan had been telling us in the first three years of his job. With how close to the vest Hennigan always kept his thoughts and motives, the one constant was always that the team would thrive organically. This turned out to be a sham.
Needless to say, I've lost faith in both Skiles and Hennigan for the reasons I've given above. It's my opinion that the team should move on to a different head coach who can better utilize the players on his or her roster. It's also my opinion that the team should move on from Hennigan, now that he's drafted a defensible roster, because it's become clear that he isn't capable of doing anything successfully outside of drafting. Until the Magic do these two things, I don't see a future where the team is a successful contender. Whether you agree or disagree, I wanted to thank you for reading my place to vent, and I want to apologize if any of this is unclear or otherwise doesn't make any sense to you.
