<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post"> Allow me to be the Magic malcontent today. Just call me Mike Be-Cranky. As the Magic players clean out their lockers, pack up their Hummers and head out for summer vacation, let me send them off with this postseason pleasantry: Yo, fellas, in the grand scheme of things this season, you really didn't do diddly. All that fluffy, feel-good civic pride and optimism about the Magic's red-hot finish and brief flirtation with the playoffs was nice and all, but do you know what it translates into next year? Absolutely, positively zippo. "It's a steppingstone," Magic guard Jameer Nelson said Thursday. Maybe. Maybe not. "This has given us confidence," fellow point guard Carlos Arroyo said. "Next year is going to be great." We'll see. Yes, I recognize the Magic at least and at last have some hope going into next year, which certainly beats going into the offseason wondering which stiff they will take in the draft, what aging has-been they will sign during free agency or which body part Grant Hill will have surgery on next. I also acknowledge that 16-6 is the best finish in franchise history, which is much better for season-ticket sales than last year's woeful 1-8 finish. But this just in: The Magic finished with the exact 36-46 record as last year when Coach Johnny Davis got fired and General Manager John Weisbrod -- wink, wink -- "resigned" to pursue a career as a hockey puck. This year, with the same record, we are hailing Coach Brian Hill as a miracle worker and trumpeting co-assistant GMs Otis Smith and Dave Twardzik as the greatest talent scouts since Colonel Tom Parker discovered Elvis. Granted, the Magic do seem to be headed down the right road, but in this city built on make-believe, that road could be a mirage. A quick history lesson: The hottest team in the league at the end of last season was the Golden State Warriors, who were being lauded as an up-and-coming playoff contender by local media. "Expectations in the past seven or so weeks have risen like Jason Richardson to the rim in an alley-oop world," one West Coast newspaper wrote at the end of last season. "The Warriors won 14 of their last 18 games, with six of those victories coming against playoff-bound teams." Sound familiar, Magic fans? The Warriors, by the way, finished 13th out of 15 teams in the West this season, 10 games out of the final playoff spot. Even Brian Hill, relying upon some historical perspective, is wary about feeling too good about his team's late-season run. "Every year, during the last 25 or 30 games of the NBA season, there's always some players or teams that suddenly start performing at a higher level," Hill says. "The question is: Why? Is it because the pressure is off? Is it because teams don't take you seriously because of where you sit record-wise?" The fact is, some of the better teams the Magic played late in the season -- the Heat and Pistons in particular -- were on cruise control waiting for the playoffs to begin. Give the Magic credit for caring enough to play hard at the end of the season, but can they win games at the beginning of a season when everybody's playing hard? "Next year's going to be more difficult," Hill says, "because we're going to have to play with the pressure of expectations." Forget what happened late in the season; we will get a truer picture of what this Magic team is made of during the offseason. Do they want it bad enough, and will they work hard enough to get better? Will Dwight Howard improve his free-throw shooting and develop some pet moves in the post? Will Darko Milicic get stronger? Will Grant Hill get healthy? Until next season, Magic, let ol' Be-Cranky here leave you with one final thought: Finishing strong and missing the playoffs doesn't make you golden. It only makes you Golden State.</div> Source I don't know what's wrong with this guy. I thought it was an interesting article and I wanted to present you guys with the question, do you think we accomplished anything? I think we have. We have shown the rest of the league that we are for real and even though we didn't make the playoffs, who expected us too? We had an amazing run and I just hope we can prove this guy wrong next season.
In essence we didn't prove anything. He's right in that regard. Hope for next year isn't really accomplishing anything. I do think we will be better than the Warriors finished this yera, just in the fact that we are in the worst division in the worst conference of the NBA.
The difference is the difference between Jameer Nelson, Hedo Turkoglu, Dwight Howard, Darko Milicic and . . . I dono, Mike Dunleavy? Baron can dunk better than Jameer and is more athletic and taller, but I like Jameer better for this team. Besides that we're stronger at absolutely every position except shooting guard, where no one compares to J-Rich on our team.
The games against Dallas and San Antonio were both very important for those Texas teams, and they hardly meant anything to us, yet we still beat them. It was Tim Duncan's best game of the season, and we beat the Spurs in San Antonio by 12. I have a feeling this guy didn't watch all the games. Everything he says in that article can be easily contradicted.
