NBA Week 14 rewind: Domination never looked so easy

Who’s Struggling?

The Orlando Magic are this week’s struggling franchise, as their eight-game losing streak sent them falling down the Eastern Conference to just 12th place with a 21-25 record.

It wasn’t that long ago that they looked like a team on the rise. They’ve ranked among the top teams in the NBA for opponent field goal percentage, appeared in the East playoff picture, and kicked off the season with a thrilling triple-overtime game against the Thunder — which will forever be one of the best games of 2015-16.

At the very least it looked like their young talent would make them an exciting team to watch, although that hasn’t quite been reality lately.

The Magic started the season as a team who were going to push the pace and play aggressive defense at the perimeter. They have fast, athletic players like Victor Oladipo, Mario Hezonja, Elfrid Payton and Aaron Gordon, and youth and energy should be their style. Over recent weeks, though, they’ve lost that.

As backup big man Jason Smith has said, that’s exactly the problem (per Josh Robbins of the Orlando Sentinel):

"“We tried to establish that identity of a team that’s very high pace, high energy, and we’ve just let that go,” reserve big man Jason Smith said. “It’s mind-boggling. I’ve been on teams where you have that and you have a little bit of a slip-off, but for the most part, you keep that high energy and pace. But it’s almost like we’ve lost our confidence out there.”"

One of their major problems has been their offense. Players like Gordon, Payton and even Tobias Harris at times struggle from the perimeter, which has led to them ranking 21st in the NBA in made threes per game.

Since January 1 when they’ve really started to cool down, the Magic have scored just 94.9 points per game, placing them 26th in the league. As for their net rating in this span, they’re even worse at -9.4 (27th in the league, per NBA.com).

Before winning a 119-114 shootout against the Celtics on Sunday night, the Magic simply looked lost. At least after shooting 53.7 percent against Boston they stopped the win-less skid stretching to 10 games. However, as they face the Spurs, Thunder, Clippers and Hawks twice in their next five games, the Magic are going to have a seriously tough time turning things around.

The Phoenix Suns have earned themselves another appearance now as well. Thanks to some late night reporting from Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports, the expected has become confirmed and Suns head coach Jeff Hornacek has been fired.

It’s hardly surprising. Phoenix have fallen into a total state of disarray at 14-35 and everything has continued to go downhill since they lost Eric Bledsoe to a torn meniscus. The losing streaks just keep racking up and as is always the case, the coach took the hit for the team and will now be replaced. As Wojnarowski also reported, the top interim head coach candidates are two of the Suns’ assistants Corey Gaines and Earl Watson.

Next: The Best Highlights of Week 14