Facing heightened speculation that he’s about to lose his job, along with palpable frustration within the Orlando Magic organization about his team’s performance, coach Jacque Vaughn said Friday that he’s not allowing himself to be distracted by noise surrounding his uncertain future.
“I do my job every day,” Vaughn said Friday. “I don’t abide by the tyranny of other people’s attitudes and moods. I’m ready to rock ‘n’ roll.”
Vaughn is scheduled to coach the Magic when they face the Dallas Mavericks on Saturday night at Amway Center.
“I don’t think that his job should be on the line,” Magic center Nikola Vucevic said. “I think Jacque does his job well and I think he has all the players’ support. I can speak for myself: He’s always been there for me, believed in me and given me a chance and always had confidence in me. So I enjoy playing for him and I don’t think it’s his fault that we’re having a bad record right now. As players, we’ve got to find a better way.”
But frustration with the Magic’s play is rising.
The Magic have lost a season-high seven consecutive games (13 of their last 15 overall) and allowed at least 100 points in 11 consecutive games.
Vaughn’s team hit one of its lowest points Thursday night, during a lopsided 115-100 loss to the short-handed Milwaukee Bucks. The Bucks led the Magic by as many as 29 points, leading to two occasions in which Magic fans rained sustained boos onto the Amway Center court.
One member of the organization said that management is “not happy at all” with the team’s current play and added, “We will not settle for this.”
The Magic hired Vaughn in July 2012, after he spent two seasons as an assistant coach with the San Antonio Spurs.
A few weeks after he was hired, the team traded away disgruntled superstar Dwight Howard. During Orlando’s first two seasons with Vaughn as its coach, the team sought to increase its draft lottery position and posted a 43-121 record.
This season, Vaughn’s third in the job, was supposed to be the year the team’s young nucleus of Vucevic, forward Tobias Harris and guard Victor Oladipo, along with rookies Elfrid Payton and Aaron Gordon, took a step forward.
It hasn’t worked out so far.
The Magic hold a 15-34 record, the fifth-worst record in the NBA.
After 49 games last season, the Magic were 13-36.
On Thursday night against the Bucks, the Magic started a 20-year-old rookie point guard (Payton), a 22-year-old second-year shooting guard (Oladipo), a 19-year-old rookie small forward (Gordon), a 31-year-old power forward (Channing Frye) and a 24-year-old center (Vucevic).
As recently as a month ago, the consensus within the Magic was that the team’s youth and inexperience were the primary causes of the team’s troubles.
Now, it’s becoming difficult to ignore not just that the Magic are losing.
It’s how they’re losing that concerns Magic officials.
“Everyone has their opinion of what their expectations are going to be,” Vaughn said when asked about expectations for his team. “I know who I’m coaching and I know the squad that I have, and my job is to push this squad to get the most out of them.”
Asked if he and his coaching staff are maximizing their roster’s talent, Vaughn responded, “We’re definitely trying to, without a doubt. I think we’ve had different circumstances throughout the course of the year, but our job is to get the best out of these guys and we’ll continue to try to do that.”
The time could be running out.
“At the end of the day, we’re the ones going out there and performing,” Vucevic said. “I think a lot of those games that we lost, it wasn’t about the X’s and O’s that he put out. It was about our effort and what we did out there. I don’t think that speculation should be out there at all.”
jrobbins@orlandosentinel.com. Read his blog at OrlandoSentinel.com/magicblog and follow him on Twitter at @JoshuaBRobbins. Sentinel staff writer Brian Schmitz contributed to this report.
