A Q-and-A with new Magic coach Scott Skiles

OS: You were known as a tough player. Can a coach make his players tough?

Skiles: I'm just arbitrarily picking out one thing ... If you'll step up in an NBA game and take a charge, that signifies some toughness. Well, sometimes you'll watch a team and you won't see any of that going on and somebody could say, "They're not very tough."

Well, it could just be they haven't got their habits in order enough, that they're not in position at the right time and place to even take that charge. Again, that's just one little example. That's an area that a coach can help in. Somebody could look and say, "Oh, they're getting tougher." Well, actually, they didn't get any tougher. They weren't there in time before, and now they're there.

One thing is you have to talk about it every day. You have to talk about it [like], "Look, guys, it's incredibly hard to win one game, let alone a playoff game." ... You just have to keep talking about it. You've got to show things on tape where we can get tougher. You've got to show where we can get mentally tougher. Maybe there's a game or a scrimmage or an exhibition game [or] an early-season game where we sort of wilt down the stretch. You've got to look at those minutes. You've got to look at plays that can be made. And you've got to hope to just sort of step-by-step, incrementally [have] guys go from sort of young players that are good players that don't understand how tough it is yet to being tougher. I know it can be done. But it's not because the coach is tough and he waves a magic wand and everybody gets tougher. It's because the players are taking ownership of it, know how important it is and they're just getting more mentally tough.

OS: You've had a chance to assess your team. What does the team need to do better to win more games?

Skiles: My sense is I've got a whole bunch of really good hard-working young guys that want to get better, and that's really good. That's step No. 1: the willingness to listen, learn, grow with each other. There's no major chemistry issues in that group, which is great. So now you can come at it from a basketball standpoint.

Our backcourt — and I'm going to put Evan [Fournier] in that group with Elfrid [Payton] and Victor [Oladipo] — in my opinion, has a ton of potential. I think those guys should be excellent defensively, and they will be. There's a nice mix in that three-guard group of ball-handling, shooting, passing. We've got to get better with our decision-making off the dribble.