On the day Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy claimed that star center Dwight Howard wants him fired but also said he expected to remain as coach through the rest of the season, his team did little to help his job security.
The Magic lost their fifth straight, 96-80 to the Knicks, the first five-game losing streak in Van Gundy’s five-year tenure in Orlando that has devolved into a "Dwightmare" for the Magic instead of their opponents.
“I think that we'll be fine,” Van Gundy said, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “I think we'll get back to playing well. I think that things tend to snowball like this, and other teams have had these stretches early in the year. Other than the top four teams in the league, everybody's had these stretches. You get discouraged and nothing's going right and then people start pressing, and it's sort of a snowball effect.
“But you'll break out of it. Somewhere along the way, playing well once will spur us back to playing well.”
They’d better hurry. The Magic (32-23) have 11 games remaining in their regular season, and Thursday’s loss dropped them into a tie with the Atlanta Hawks for the No. 5/No. 6 seeds in the Eastern Conference, 1½ games behind the Boston Celtics, noteworthy because the fifth and sixth seeds don’t have the home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs.
Worse, the Magic are only 2½ games up on the seventh-place Philadelphia 76ers (29-25), their opponents Saturday in Philly. Being the No. 7 seed in the Eastern Conference would mean facing the Miami Heat or Chicago Bulls in the first round.
So, needless to say, the Magic have a lot on their plate right now. Van Gundy is expected to travel with the team to Philadelphia, for whatever that's worth, according to CBSSports' Ken Berger.
"We know we're having a tough stretch," said Howard, who would not answer questions about his relationship with Van Gundy, the Sentinel reported. "Shots are not falling. Our defense has not been great. But we've just got to stick together. We're going through one of the toughest times in the season right now. There's a lot going on as a team."
Orlando hadn’t lost five consecutive games since Jan. 12-20, 2007, the season before Van Gundy became the team's head coach.
"It's five games in a row, but you can overstate it, too," Van Gundy said. "It's not like we've played five awful games in a row."
In the context of a season-long drama over whether Howard would return next season, magnified by Thursday’s “coach said/player said” situation, however, it’s hard to ignore the subsequent blowout loss.
"I've never been on a team that hasn't gone through some tough times,” guard J.J. Redick said afterward, according to the Sentinel. I think our tough times are a little more magnified this season because of everything that's gone on off the court."
And for all of Thursday’s off-court drama, Van Gundy said he doesn’t expect to lose his job and that he, Howard and general manager Otis Smith met after Van Gundy claimed earlier in the day that Howard had asked that Van Gundy be fired, a claim that Howard denied.
"Look, we've been together all year this year," Van Gundy said. "We've been together for five years. So we know each other very well, and Dwight will go out and play, and I'll coach, and that's the understanding. We know that."
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