By John DentonMay 4, 2015
ORLANDO – The Orlando Magic are three weeks into the offseason, but that doesn’t mean that the organization’s Basketball Operations department is resting.
Quite the contrary, actually.
There is plenty of work to do this summer for a Magic organization that must hire a head coach, prepare for the June 25th NBA Draft and evaluate free agents for the July courting and signing period. Despite finishing with a 25-52 record, the Magic are an attractive product to prospective coaches and free agents because of the team’s strong ownership and a dynamic young core of players that includes Nikola Vucevic, Victor Oladipo, Tobias Harris, Elfrid Payton, Evan Fournier and Aaron Gordon.
That group helped the Magic defeat playoff teams such as Chicago, Portland, New Orleans, Boston and Milwaukee down the stretch this past season.
General Manager Rob Hennigan, along with Assistant GMs Scott Perry and Matt Lloyd, are conducting the search for the team’s next head coach. Their finalists for the position will ultimately be brought before CEO Alex Martins and then the DeVos family before a hire is made.
Hennigan has kept mostly quiet about the coaching prospects that he will choose from, wanting to ``protect the integrity of the search.’’ He did say recently that interim coach James Borrego, who led the Magic to a 10-20 mark over the final 2 ½ months of the season after Jacque Vaughn was dismissed, will be interviewed for the full-time position. Hennigan also said that Magic fans can be confident that the team will get the coach that best fits the direction that the organization wants to head in the years to come.
``We’re going to consider everything. Our focus and goal is to make the right decision in order to find the right person to coach this team to lead us to where we want to get,’’ said Hennigan, who was signed to a contract extension through the 2017-18 season last week.
The Magic will send a delegation of executives, scouts and talent evaluators to Chicago later this month to interview and analyze potential players for the NBA Draft. Orlando will find out which pick it will have in the June draft on May 19 when the NBA Draft Lottery is conducted in New York. The Magic have an 8.8 percent chance of winning the top pick, a 9.7 percent shot at the second selection and a 10.7 percent chance of jumping up to third. The team with the best odds hasn’t won the first pick since 2004 – the year that the Magic won the lottery and picked Dwight Howard No. 1 overall.
The Magic have proven themselves to be quite adept at finding talent in the draft in recent years. Oladipo, the No. 2 pick in 2013, finished runner-up in the Rookie of the Year award race in 2014 and this past season he boosted his scoring average 4.1 points per game to 17.9 ppg. Payton, whom the Magic acquired in a draft day trade last June, finished fourth in last week’s Rookie of the Year voting. This past season, Payton became the first rookie in 18 years to post triple-doubles in consecutive games.
Despite the pain experienced over the past three seasons while rebuilding the roster, Hennigan is confident that the Magic are headed in the right direction. With the addition of a new coach, further development of the team’s young players and a potential free-agent acquisition, Hennigan feels the Magic will be in a position to make significant strides next season.
``We want to be a playoff team. We’re not trying to be a lottery team. That’s counter to our goals,’’ the GM said. ``This past season has been frustrating. I think you can ask our players, coaches and myself – we expect more. We’re also realistic about how young we are. I think we’re realistic about the development that our players can make going forward. We think with their continual development, with a few pieces added here or there, we will start to turn this thing.’’
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