Lineup shuffle can give Magic needed size in Game 2
Freeman: Big-men rivalries dry up
LOS ANGELES -- When a team loses by 25 points in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, the spotlight shines on the losing coach. Stan Van Gundy didn't hide from it.
After his media briefing ended Friday, Van Gundy pulled up a chair outside the visiting locker room at Staples Center for what amounted to a group therapy session with a small gathering of writers. Losing teams make adjustments, so you're up, Stan. What's it gonna be?
"There's two or three things in terms of who we play that we have to at least look at," Van Gundy said.
The longer Van Gundy spoke, the more obvious it became that the Lakers present by far the most difficult matchup problems the Magic have seen. The diversity of their offense, the searing focus of Kobe Bryant, the length and quantity of their big men -- obvious answers were in short supply even after what must have been a demoralizing film session.
• Series: Lakers 1, Magic 0
And the longer Van Gundy went on, the more apparent it became that he didn't have the answers yet -- that this was more of a thinking-out-loud exercise than a summary of what he already knew.
For starters, Van Gundy all but dismissed benching point guard Rafer Alston in favor of Jameer Nelson, saying he made a mistake by playing Nelson for the entire second quarter Thursday night. If anything, Van Gundy said, Nelson needs shorter stints on the floor and Alston needs longer ones.
"I'm not going to say never to anything, but I cannot imagine here in a two-week period after four months off that I would get to a point where I would be comfortable starting him," Van Gundy said. "I just don't see that. And if you look at [Thursday] night, the start of the game was good. That was our best stretch of the game, the first quarter."
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| Marcin Gortat can help the Magic eliminate the rebounding disparity. (Getty Images) |
"That's up to him," Van Gundy said. "If I'm looking from the outside, that sounds like an excuse to me."
But Van Gundy softened that position considerably afterward, admitting that he stayed with Nelson too long in the second quarter and that it might have affected both point guards.
"I think he should be in shorter stretches," Van Gundy said. "That sort of lends itself to coming off the bench. I just think the 12 minutes at one stretch was too long. I probably ran his tank down to empty and then he wasn't effective in the second half."
So if there's no change coming at point guard -- at least in terms of who starts -- what else is there? Van Gundy has tinkered with his starting shooting guards in the past two series, going with J.J. Redick all the way through the Boston series and then Courtney Lee against Cleveland. But the first quarter, when Lee started and split time with Mickael Pietrus, was Orlando's only competitive quarter of the game with the exception of fourth-quarter garbage time. And watching the video only confirmed Van Gundy's gut feeling from Thursday night: It's harder to zero in on potentially helpful lineup or rotation changes when the effort and intensity weren't there.
That leaves really only one viable change for Game 2 on Van Gundy's menu, one that might just be risky enough to make sense given how dire the Magic's situation would be if they went home down 0-2. That's right, it could be Hammer Time. As in the "Polish Hammer."
Van Gundy agreed with the laymen observers gathered on his doorstep that Marcin Gortat was his most effective player Thursday night. In a shade more than 20 minutes, Gortat scored only four points, but had four blocks and eight rebounds on a night when the Magic were outrebounded 55-41. Van Gundy went to a twin towers look with Dwight Howard and Gortat on the floor at the same time for brief stints, and he wouldn't rule out using more of that to combat the Lakers' size and length in Game 2.
"We can play bigger, but when you play bigger you can't spread the floor out at all then," Van Gundy said. "It may be something to look at, but I don't know if it helps or hurts from an offensive standpoint. It would certainly help us defensively. But offensively, I don't know if it helps or hurts. You get less shooting on the floor and less of an ability to spread the floor out. ... Even though we're bigger, we bring their big people into the lane even more, so it's sort of a Catch-22."
Short of shaking up his rotation and playing a bigger lineup, what else can Van Gundy and his coaching staff concoct to prevent this series from getting out of hand? Everything has to be geared toward Howard, who wound up with only six field-goal attempts in Game 1.
It was widely expected that the Lakers would show Howard a steady diet of single coverage in an effort to keep Orlando's 3-point shooters from hurting them. They didn't quite do that -- they did something even better. They double teamed him from different spots on the floor -- sometimes with the other big man sealing off the baseline, sometimes with Alston's man sagging to the paint, and sometimes with the man who was guarding the cutter.
These were all looks that Howard hadn't seen consistently in the past two series, and it showed. On top of that, the Lakers varied the timing of the double teams -- doubling on the catch, on the dribble, or not at all. Occasionally, the Lakers even put 6-foot-10 forward Lamar Odom on Howard, which turned either Pau Gasol or Andrew Bynum into the help defender and pulled Howard away from the basket on the defensive end.
"They're going to make it tough to get Dwight rolling," Van Gundy said. "We got him the ball a lot [Thursday] night, but they're always coming with another guy. ... We are looking at some subtle adjustments to try to get our spacing maybe a little bit better for him."
As Van Gundy's therapy session was wrapping up outside the Magic locker room, the search for answers was only beginning.
