Using history as guide, Orlando’s struggles are cause for serious concern

Orlando has tried to make up for its lack of scorers by posting up Dwight Howard and running sets designed to create space. (AP)

After another brutal loss Monday night, the Magic’s players and coaches expressed optimism that their offense could recover from its current slump and perform at a level good enough for the team to realistically compete against the league’s best. We all know Orlando lacks a knockout perimeter star capable of consistently breaking down the defense via an isolation play or even a straight high pick-and-roll. The latter weapon remains central to what Orlando does, but it has become less potent as Jameer Nelson and Hedo Turkoglu have struggled of late.

Orlando makes up for this alleged shortcoming by posting up Dwight Howard and running sets filled with motion and screening, stuff designed to create space that the team’s perimeter players cannot create on their own. The Magic know their offense hasn’t been working lately, but the feeling internally is that it can work again, given proper rest, health and effort. Orlando’s recent struggles, in other words, might stem from a random stretch of bad shooting or exhaustion from a six-games-in-eight-nights stretch — or some combination of both.

Here’s how bad the Magic’s offense has been: In four of those eight games, they scored at a per-possession rate lower than the Wizards, the league’s least efficient offensive team. (They managed this in one other game before this stretch — against Chicago on Jan. 6.) In two others of those eight games, they barely edged out Washington’s average scoring rate, according to Hoopdata. Six recent games, six performances on par with the very worst scoring team in the league.

But some of those performances were really bad, beyond just Wizards bad. In four of those recent games, the Magic failed to crack 87.5 points per 100 possessions — a barrier that sits a full 12.5 points per 100 possession below the league’s average, and well below the Wizards. Those truly awful performances, including three that are just completely off the scoring map, are where Orlando’s season begins to separate itself from the run-of-the-mill struggles every good team goes through.

To test the “random blip” theory, I went back through game logs of the 12 conference finalists from the three previous seasons to see how often they experienced these sorts of scoring slumps. Hoopdata‘s game logs, which include points per possession, go back only through the 2008-09 season, so the sample is not nearly as large as we might like. But it includes a variety of teams, ranging from scoring machines (the 2009-10 Suns), to teams reliant on the three-point shot (the Magic of 2008-09 and the following season), and one of the very worst offensive teams ever to make the Finals (the 2009-10 Celtics).

On average, these teams played 15 games in which they scored at a rate lower than that of the league’s worst offense for that season. That would work out to about 12 such stinkers over the course of a 66-game season. As mentioned above, Orlando has played five such games already, putting them on pace for about 16 sub-Wizards stinkers over the full 66 games. That’s more than what we’d expect based on the play of recent conference finalists, but it’s at least in the same ball park. Some cause for encouragement, perhaps.

But you begin to see a difference when you look at the very worst offensive performances — the ones in which Orlando comes in a dozen or so points below the league’s average per-game output. The Magic have played four games in the past 12 days in which they have scored at a rate of 87.5 points per possessions or worse — a full 12.5 points below the league’s average. Again: four such games in 12 days.

Those conference finalists? On average, they suffered through about 4.75 such games per season – per 82-game season. The 2009-10 Suns skew that number a bit, since they experienced precisely zero such games. But even if you take them out, the average jumps only to about 5.2 — one more such game over a full 82 than the Magic have played in the last 12 days.

And some of those very inefficient performances from prior conference finalists have logical, schedule-related explanations. Three of Dallas’ paltry five qualifying games last season came with Dirk Nowitzki either out with a knee injury or in his first game back from the injury. Two others came in LeBron James’ season-openers against Boston — in 2008-09 with the Cavs, and last season with the Heat. And none of these teams had games that ranked as low on the efficiency scale as the eggs Orlando laid last week against Boston and New Orleans.

Put simply: Every team, even the best scoring teams, have bad games offensively, but no team that has gone deep into the playoffs over the last three seasons has experienced anything like the Magic have over the last 12 days. A couple had stretches of three straight games in which they scored at a rate worse than the league’s worst scoring team for that season, but even in those stretches, they were essentially neck and neck with the worst team and within shouting distance of the league average.

All of this leaves three unanswered questions:

1. Are the last 12 conference finalists typical of good playoff teams in general? Without an easily searchable database of advanced (i.e., per-possession) game logs prior to the 2008-09 season, that question either demands much more time or the authorship of someone with more technical know-how than I. But my guess would be this sample of teams is basically typical of the sorts that advance far into the postseason, the kind this Magic team must strive to be in order to keep Dwight Howard.

2. To what degree is the schedule sinking Orlando’s performance? The team started off very well, and ranked second in the league in points per possession just eight days ago. They’re 19th after Monday’s loss. The truth lies somewhere in between those extremes, but if the truth settles in around the 15th-20th range, this team is toast. We’ll see as the season goes along how badly Orlando’s packed recent schedule impacted its offense.

3. Are more teams playing wildly substandard offensive games, relative to the league average, in this cramped season? This question demands a post of its own, and if the answer is “yes,” perhaps the Magic could find some encouragement there. But the key phrase there is “relative to league average.” Scoring is way down, so identifying low-scoring games isn’t enough. You’d have to see if more teams are scoring pitifully compared to the league average to begin any analysis of whether the lockout-shortened schedule has led to more off-the-charts clank-fests.