Brian Hill isn't a coach. He thinks he is, but I don't even think he sees the games. The Magic lost to the Hornets with West, Peja, and Paul. Being inconsistent is gonna hurt this team's plan of making it anywhere.
So I'm not off base with my assessment of not liking Brian Hill? Everyone was jumping on me when I said it a couple of weeks ago. We are the Jaguars of the NBA. We play to the level of our competition. We hang in and beat the good teams, but can't beat bad teams.
Almost all of the frustration from last night's game is pretty much gone but I still want to talk about what we did wrong and what things need to be changed if we want to make a strong push come playoff time. Our first mistake was playing down to our opponent. Chris Paul, David West, Peja Stojackovic, and Bobby Jackson were all hurt so there was no excuses for losing this game. We can't let players like Jannero Pargo, Linton Johnson, and Desmond Mason torch us. Our coaching staff needs to keep this team focused and not let them take nights off. Brian Hill can't let this team get lazy or we will start to fall behind in the standings like we did in late December when we had a rough stretch of losses. Our second mistake was terrible coaching. Dwight Howard sat out almost the entire fourth quarter despite having only two fouls. He was not injured and could have easily been in the game. So that leaves me wondering, what the hell was Brian Hill thinking? If you have one of the most dominant big men in the game, why wouldn't you be playing him in the fourth quarter when your team needs him most? Dwight is our best player and was having a good game last night yet Hill had him on the bench for the fourth quarter up until there was 3 minutes left in the game. Also, when you're backup point guard continues to jack up jumpshots on fast breaks, usually it's time to take them out. Two consecutive fast breaks were ruined by Carlos Arroyo last night because he was trying to increase his stats rather than hit the easy shot. On both occasions, Arroyo had two teammates alongside him (Bogans and Hedo) against one defender. Rather than passing to the person with the easiest shot, Arroyo stopped at the free throw line and took a jumpshot. This is a terrible decision and a n even worse decision was to leave him in the game when Jameer Nelson was playing terrific last night. These are just stupid moves and Brian Hill's substitution patterns have left me confused several times this year. Let's get back to Carlos Arroyo for a second and talk about our backup guards. Bottom line, they are horrible. Dooling and Arroyo shot a combined 1-12 from the field last night and many of these shots were contested 20-25 footers. Like I said before, when you have a dominant big man in Dwight Howard, you shouldn't be settling for those jumpshots. Give the ball to Dwight and let him beat his man. When Howard does get the ball, he does what he is supposed. He forced Tyson Chandler to foul out and nobody on the Hornets could slow him down. Yet we continue to let our guards (Dumb and Dumber) jack up shots from outside the paint. Sickening. Our play in overtime was reason enough that we deserved to lose. We couldn't get anything going and we didn't even manage to score until there was 10 seconds left (Keyon Dooling made a desperation three). The best part of our overtime performance? Dwight Howard touched the ball twice. Only twice. Keyon Dooling, Jameer Nelson, and Hedo Turkoglu all tried to carry the load offensively and in the end it screwed us over. I'll say it one more time, give Dwight the damn ball! Another thing this team needs to improve is free throws. We had the chance to win the game last night from the line when we were down two and Dwight got sent to the charity stripe. He made 1 of 2 and brought the game within one. After missing the second free throw, Darko got the rebound and was fouled giving him two shots. This meant if Darko nailed both free throws, we win the game. Of course, Darko only hit one and we had to go to overtime. All night long we struggled from the line and there is no excuse for that. We shot 65.2% from the line which is terrible. If we had made some of our free throws, we would have won last night with ease. That's pretty much it. Playing down to our opponent, bad coaching, stupid shots from our guards, not giving Dwight the ball, and missed free throws killed us last night. Hopefully we can get some of these things worked out soon because we need every win we can get as a young and inexperienced team.
