How the Orlando Magic can improve this offseason with Keith Smith

In this conversation, Stephen Cameron and Keith Smith delve into the Orlando Magic’s offseason strategy, reflecting on the previous season’s successes and challenges. They discuss the financial implications of player contracts, potential trades, and the importance of draft capital. The conversation highlights the need for the Magic to improve their offensive capabilities while maintaining their strong defensive identity. They explore various trade targets and free agency options, emphasizing the significance of strategic moves to enhance the team’s competitiveness moving forward.

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[Music] [Music] Closer. Closer. Closer. Closer. Closer. Closer. All right. All right. All right. Welcome to another episode of the Closeup, a part of Orlando Magic HQ. I’m your host, Stephen Cameron. Today’s a fun one. We’re going to continue that conversation we had with Keith Smith of Spotra in the front office show. Um he is a great guest. We’re in the middle of a deep conversation about the Orlando Magic off season talking all things salary cap player contracts, potential offseason moves that the Magic could have. At the end of this episode, you’re going to hear we directly address listener questions as well. It’s a really fun conversation that we’re in and we hope you enjoy it. Make sure you check the show description whether you’re listening on a podcast platform or YouTube if you want to get more information on Keith Smith and how where his content can be found because he’s a great resource during this time of the year. The links are in the description right below. Um, and he’s great. Again, he is d he is breaking down this information so digestible for all of us to understand at a deeper level and how the Magic can operate this off season. So, we hope you’re enjoying the conversation. Thank you for supporting the show. And again, if you’d like to support us a little bit more, you’re more than welcome to check out our Patreon program for a small monthly subscription. It helps us operate and it gets you some extra content, gets you involved in our community group chat. Um, and some other benefits during the season like discounted tickets and stuff like that. Obviously, we’re in the offseason right now for the Magic, so no discounted tickets this summer, but you know, when the season comes around, we’ll we’ll still have that as a as an option for you. Thank you so much for joining and uh please like and subscribe as you can and enjoy the show. When when you look at the Magic roster and we see improvement that needs to happen, do you think put your GM cap on for a second, do you think they’re looking like, hey, we’re going to go after and try and improve the starting unit or do you think their focus is more trying to improve the second unit? Cuz like I kind of don’t see them trying to do both this summer. I kind of lend more towards the second unit and that’s where they’re going to try and really bolster things up, improve their sixth, seventh type players off the bench. But in your opinion, how do you think they’re going to attack improving this roster from a strategic standpoint? Yeah, I think you know for sure you have three starting spots filled with health with Beno, Vagner, and Suggs. And so that’s that’s forward, a wing, and a guard. Now, the question that I think you have to ask if you’re the Magic, kind of two semi-related question. One, can Jaylen Suggs be a point guard on offense? We know he can be on defense. He can defend any guard in the league. We’re not. And related, all right, if he can be, is Contavius Cwell Pope going to be the guy we saw in like March who was the guy again. It was hitting his shots and all that stuff, or is he going to be the guy we saw for large chunks of the regular season and in the playoffs where he wasn’t really making shots? And if it’s if you believe, all right, we we we found something. we can get it figured out. It’ll get sorted. All right. Well, now that’s four of five starting spots. Somebody will be the starting center, whether that’s Carter, you know, uh returns and retains that spot or Bat gets elevated or whatever it may be. So, all right, so we feel pretty good about that. Then you go about let’s go improve the bench. If your thought process is Suggs is more of a two on the offensive end and we need a primary playmaker creator or at least somebody who can ease the burden on Banero and Vagner to have to kind of create everything more than Suggs can. The idea would be Jaylen Suggs is a really overqualified fourth offensive creator. Let’s put him in that spot and boy we lifted our offense big time. I think that’s kind of the way they need to go because of where this team wants to go. 4550 win regular season and making it to the playoffs can’t be the goal anymore. Sure. Goal has to be win playoff series. They’re not going to win playoff series with guys on the floor that can’t ease the offensive burden on Ben Carol and Vagner. You saw it. Boston’s better equipped than a lot of teams, but you saw it even in the Cleveland series a year prior. They just start bending everything towards those two guys, and it just gets really hard for them to get out of their own way to create offense because there’s only so much those guys can do without getting a little crazy with the ball or with taking bad shots or whatever. So, that becomes situation. Man, we got to really create something. So, I I think they’re going to do something to try to get somebody in who can help. I’ve eased off. He probably even said it to you in years past. I don’t want anybody coming in that’s going to take the ball out of Ben Carameron Vagner’s hands too much. I still don’t want it to be somebody who’s going to come in and dribble the life out of the clock with 20 or 24 seconds. But I want somebody who can ease their burden, somebody you can throw it to. And then the nice thing is then you’re like, “All right, like I said, Suggs is now a very overqualified fourth option.” And we’re going to play every key minute of every game with two of those four guys on the floor and we’re going to feel really good about, you know, what we can do on the offensive end because again, the defense is going to be there. I’m not worried about that. I’ve always kind of looked at this off season thinking they might be comfortable rolling the starters back one more year and see healthy Suggs next to healthy Paulo and Fron and just another one more at least at least up to the deadline see how it looks with KCP. I’ve always kind of thought this team might look at the bench where their guard units have just been a mess and see if they can find like a super six-man that is very like overqualified to be a six-man, but that’s the role he’s going to play in Orlando. So that person can also like if KCP or Jaylen Suggs just doesn’t have it, they can like bring him in to pair with one or the other to kind of be that player that is also playing with the starters. Maybe closing games if Jaylen Suggs is out can step up into, you know, for an injury because he’s injury prone. That’s not a that’s we’re not hiding anything there anymore. You know, they can jump up and be that starter level. That’s kind of always the mindset I’ve operated under. But I also think the way you’ve talked about addressing the starting unit has a lot of validity to it. Valid validility. A lot of value in what you just said. Thank you. I can’t speak today. I need another cup of coffee. Don’t worry. It’s early for you. Yeah. But there’s a lot more. I think there’s a lot of power in what you said as well in that type of approach. And so it’s going to be really interesting. I mean, I guess in theory they really went balls to the wall. They could do both, but we’ll see how how aggressive they get. I don’t think they do that. I think they make one really solid move and and and a and an addition somehow like we’ll see maybe twoish new key rotation players um to the Magic and then they will probably say let’s see how that goes into the season and then if we need to we can make an adjustment at the deadline or the following season, right? I don’t think it has to all be fixed this off seasonason. I think they have to make a good step forward and then continue to make adjustments going forward. That’s kind of my approach there when Yeah, I’m with you. One one thing I’ll say kind of in addition to that is sure they I don’t know that they’re going to go like like you said go you know fully crazy and be like we’re bringing in you know two three new guys and you know we’re we’re doing all this stuff and we added a point guard and a big and you know a shooter like it’s that’s probably not realistic just simply because that gets difficult to pull off like it’s have the ability to do it that starts to be like We we just used all of our draft capital. We used all of our tradable contracts and now this better work cuz otherwise guess what? None of those people’s jobs anymore, right? They’re all getting fired because it didn’t work. It’s the Rob Hanigan move a little bit. Yeah. And then I think the other piece is I there’s I’ve seen some people like they got to go get a you know the name that gets thrown out a lot is go get Trey Young, go get LaMelo Ball. Yeah. You’re not. If you do that, you’re trading either Vagner or Suggs one because you’re going to have to like those teams aren’t going to give them up without getting really good players back. It’s not going to be enough to be like here’s Cole Anthony and Wendell Carter and Jonathan Isaac and one first round pick or anything. This is where I like to say just because it works in the trade machine doesn’t make it a good trade. Right. Right. Like there’s, you know, no none of those trade machines evaluate whether you made a good trade or not. They’re just telling you is it legal? hasn’t worked. So my thing is if you do something like that, the reason why you have to give up one of those two guys, the Magic a year from now are not positioned to have three guys on the roster making 30 to $40 million a piece and using their entire salary cap on that they would be so deep into the second. They’d be they would be immediately having the conversations we’re having about Boston today. Yeah. which is how are they going to start moving off some of this salary and all that and that’s not where they’re going to be. You got to look lower. That doesn’t mean you’re talking. Yeah, you mentioned Taius Jones. Tus Jones would be great if they brought him in as, you know, a backup on a minimum deal. Sure, why not? Like he’s better than Corey Joseph, I think. And sure, you know, general terms. So, yeah, let’s let’s go. And a lot of what will determine how they fill out is going to be what do they have to give up in trades? They’re doing a two or three for one trade. Now all of a sudden it’s well Cole Anthony went in the trade now we need a backup guard right so now we go out and get whoever this may be or or we traded away one of the centers so now we need to go get another center the nice thing is there’s all kinds of optionality for the Magic this summer there’s pretty much any direction you want to go you can go because the three building blocks all play very good complimentary roles to each other and have versatility that they can play different stuff You could even see a world where it’s like, you know what, we’re going to move Franmore into a second guard role next to Suggs or whoever and you know, we’re going to go with another wing because it’s a we we had a chance to land another really good wing shooter. We’ll just be huge across the board. Sure, why not? Right. As long as as long as you think, you know, he can hold up defending opposing guards. Yeah, let’s go. Like that’s the cool thing is, you know, pretty much everybody is other than Paulo who’s now he’s kind of the traditional four in the NBA. He’s kind of everybody else is Yeah, you can you kind of mix and match a lot of ways and that’s even fine with Paulo because he’s just so good and and and Paulo, you know, short stints, he can fill in that center. He can play the three a little bit, but like for the majority of the game, he’s that power forward. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I, you know, I kind of go back to any type of players they’re going to bring in, whether it’s draft or trade, they’re going to keep some sort of some of their philosophies the same as far as like they’re not going to be a a they’re going to probably want some size. Like they’re probably not looking to go bring in a six-foot point guard. They are probably still going to value positional versatility to an extent. And they’re still going to like, yo, you can’t be a complete zero on defense. You got to you got to be able to at least hold your own in some capacity, right? You don’t have to be as good as Jaylen Suggs or KCP, but you you can’t be a complete zero. That’s kind of my thing. Keith, we’ve been talking for almost an hour. I want to do a couple quick hit fan questions. We don’t have to go super in-depth with these, but I do want to hit them because we have a couple good ones. Some of them we might skip because we’ve, you know, kind of already addressed it in the conversation. So, listeners, if you’ve given a question, that is why we probably are not addressing it directly. Um the first one, let’s not go too deep in this. Do you have anyone in mind either um you know trade or free agency that you think is just like a great fit for the Magic? Yeah, I think uh Kobe White with the Bulls is somebody I would be looking at getting. He’s he’s kind of the perfect guard that we were talking about where he can scale his role up or down depending on what you need. He’s a great mix with Suggs in the back court because both of them could defend either guard positions. No one’s ever going to put Kobe White in an alldefense team, but he can hold his own. He’s got enough size to switch. He can really shoot. Um I would love to see that. He’s somebody I would consider giving up a pick or two plus the matching salary. Now, your one challenge is if you do it, you have to be really certain you can resign him a year from now because he’s going to be a free agent and his contract is too small to be reasonably extendable. He’s going to want more money than what the Bulls or the Magic could extend him for. But if the Bulls hit a point where it’s like, all right, we got to reset a little bit here. Yeah, I would look at a guy like Kobe White. That’s the guy who kind of comes immediately to mind for me. That’s like the perfect fit and I would be willing to give up some good stuff for. And if people haven’t been paying attention, Kobe White just is coming off two really good seasons in a row, but this last season was really, really good. Yeah. Yeah. He’s that kind of player that you go get and can fill in and be a starter level next to Jaylen Suggs and that’s just a killer combo. I’m going to address it kind of more from like the second unit. I think Colin Saxon is someone that’s that that could be a decent target. He’s, you know, he can play that. He He’s probably best as a six-man, can fill in as a spot starter. Pretty reasonable size contract. He would probably take a reasonable extension. He’s not someone that’s going to go get 30 $40 million on his next deal. You know, is not the most effective defender, but has moments where he can be a good like he tries and puts efforts there, and I think in a better system like under Mosley could be more effective there. Um, and a good shooter. You know, that’s kind of like I’m not going to say that’s my perfect offseason, but that that’s someone on my list as well as Kobe White, like you said. Look, let me throw just three more quick names at you. Paul, similarish kind of thought process with all these guys. Could either start, could come off the bench. Obviously, Anthony Simon’s name is going to be forever linked to the Magic until he either retires or plays for the team. Yep. A lot of that just because he’s a hometown kid. But I don’t hate it. I don’t like it as much as some of the others just because he makes a lot of money and he’s not a very good defender. Yeah. But he would really, you know, barring he gets hit with the magic curse, he should fix a lot of the shooting scoring issues and he’s a pretty good playmaker. Could play onoff ball. So, I don’t hate the idea of going to get him. I like him. I I would at least make a call to Oklahoma City and say, “Where you at on Isaiah Joe?” Only because that roster is really stuffed full. And I would at least say, you know, well, what are you thinking on a guy like him? Just again, another really good shooter on a really cost effective contract. Then I have a lot of people, I’m sure you’ve been asked the same thing. A lot of people have asked, “What about Jordan Pool?” Yeah. Like and and what I like to tell people is Jordan Pool, I know a lot of people are like because they see the highlights of him doing silly stupid stuff, but Jordan Pool became a more serious player over the last year plus, but with the Wizards where it’s like, all right, he’s actually there’s still the occasional bonehead thing in there, but for the most part, he’s played pretty serious basketball. He’s gotten back to being the guy we all kind of liked with the Warriors before his role got a little bigger than it probably should have been. And that’s that’s another one where that’s going to cost you a little bit to go get him. But, you know, is in terms of depth, you’re going to have to trade two, three guys to get him. But I don’t hate that idea. And then a free agent target I would look at would be Malcolm Brogden. Yeah. Just because fits really solid as like you could bring him in as, you know, your third guard. He doesn’t You probably don’t want to start him um because you don’t want him to get hurt, but play him 20 minutes a night in the regular season. Scalers roll up in the playoffs if you need to and move from there. all names that I’m also like monitoring and thinking about and changing my opinion about every five minutes, let’s just say. Um, no, I like a lot of those. Next question kind of fits into this because it’s like, you know, targeting free agents. Is it, and I I actually meant to ask this earlier, right now the Magic are sitting at partial MLE with like we said, I think it was like 5 million I said. Yeah. Is it possible for them to open that up and go sign someone at a higher level with the MLE or a higher version of the MLE this summer? This person specifically is asking, I’m curious if it’s possible or probable for the Magic to drop below the tax line to use the non-ax player payer MLE before making any moves, sign a guy like Trent Jr. then make moves after. Like, can you just address the MLE situation for a second? Yeah, I’ll leave the player out of it because I think that would be a massive overpay. But sure, yeah, the situation that’s where I talked about don’t be surprised if they decline Mo Vagner’s team option with the idea of we’re going to bring him back whatever fits in later, right? We’re going to bring him back at 5 million or whatever it may be. I think that’s where you need to really look at for the Magic. It is Gary Harris would need to go. Maybe Houston, we’ll see. Maybe that one’s a little closer. Uh Joseph would have to You just can’t have him on the books at 3 million. Probably goes anyway, just roster spot there. And then clearly, like we’ve been talking about, you could make a trade that frees up even more money. But just the simple version is you you basically let everybody else everybody who’s on those contracts go and then you start the reset process around, all right, we dipped enough. We can use the non- taxpayer MLE to go get whoever we think is our best fit, but then we have to be very cautious how we’re going to fill out, you know, the rest of the roster, but this they don’t have they’re not trying to dance around the apron with seven roster spots to fill. It’s like dance around the apron with like two roster spots to fill, which is a pretty good spot to be in. That makes sense. Um, okay. Next question is about Paulo and his next contract. We know he’s going to get a max extension this year. Um, if he makes AllNBA next year, does that kick him into the super max or what year does he have to make an AllNBA team to kind of hit that 30 uh 35% um or sorry, 30% of the of the of the because it’s his rookie extension. So, yeah, it’s 30%. Um, yeah. When does he have to make that team to have that kick into 30% instead of 25? next season. So, what they did with France Vagner, which I think is pretty instructional, they put the conditional language in his contract where it was either going to be if he made all NBA but didn’t make I think it was first team, he was going to get like 28 and a half instead of the full um 30. That’s become more common. Evan Mobley had that as well. Okay. He obviously by winning defensive player of the year, he got to the full 30. With Paulo though, Paulo is enough of a step ahead of Fron and I think even Moy too where it’s probably just going to be if you make solid any allNBA team any of the three it’s an automatic 30% max for him and that’s that’s where I expect that to go and then if he’s healthy I think he’ll be right there in the mix uh for all NBA it just comes down to is he going to be healthy because that’s the the big thing there were a lot of guys who it’s like well that guy you know is an allNBA level guy but they didn’t get the games played requirements. So, that that’s going to be the big thing to watch there. Yeah. And just for anybody wondering, that would see him at a starting salary uh that projects at $51 million uh in in his uh in 2627. Yeah. Not next year, but the year after. Yeah. Not next year, but the year after. So, he jumped from 15 to 51. And then that’s when you start having some serious conversations about where are we going? because now him uh Paulo and or Paulo Fron and Suggs would be on the books for about you know 180 90 million together which would be yeah a good amount like 65% of the team’s cap space something like that. Yeah. Yeah. In that range. Yeah. Probably even a little bit higher. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I mean with Paulo and Fron alone you’re you’re at uh you know 55ish. Uh then you had Jaylen Suck. Yeah. Yeah. You’re paying a lot for three guys, so you got to ask some questions there. Um, okay, last one. Let me just take a quick look. Um, yeah, this is a fun one. Granted, your Boston Celtics are one of these teams that kind of fit into this. Are there any second apron casualty teams that the Magic could potentially work with for to help them improve their roster while helping the Boston Celtics or any other team kind of in that range get into a more flexible position? Yeah, I mean they’re one of them, right? You mentioned it. Minnesota, Phoenix, those are the other teams that are like pretty sure to be, you know, dancing around that second apron. There’s just not great matches with Minnesota. And I don’t know that Minnesota is desperate to move anybody. Phoenix, unless the Magic really want to get involved in Kevin Durant, which I don’t think they do. I don’t think that makes sense. They’re probably not. That’s probably not a match. Now Boston gets more interesting. There’s a world where you could say Drew Holiday would be great for these guys to take him to the next level. The challenge is what we just talked about a year from from now when Paulo and all those guys and then you then you had Holiday in at 30 million too. That gets a little trickier. Now I personally think the Magic could if they really wanted to. Chris Porzingis is a guy who could make some sense for them. He’s on an expiring contract. They could get him by giving up just a couple guys without causing themselves major issues. Go get him and they’ve got enough depth where if he misses 40 games, it’s not the end of the world. We can get by and obviously he would help a lot with the floor spacing and everything else that they need from that position. I just don’t know that that that’s the direction they they’re going to go. I think they’re going to do a far more coste effective guy who is someone that they can have for the next 3 four years. Holiday probably makes a little too much. But if Yeah. If it’s somebody in the 20 to 25 million a year range, that’s probably a lot more reasonable than Holiday who’s making, you know, in the mid30s. Yeah. For the next couple of years, too. It’s a pretty long contract. Yeah. Unless Cleveland gets really into, you know what, we decided we have to move Darius Garland and all indications they aren’t there yet. You’re not I mean maybe maybe they you could be like, hey, what are you thinking on Max Stre like that’s somebody that would obviously help Orlando if it was like yeah you know we want to clear enough room to be able to bring back Ty Jerome and we yo we we feel like you know Strus is somebody we we could move. Yeah, you could get maybe somebody like him. But yeah, you’re you’re they’ll be aggressive in looking at stuff like that. It’ll just I don’t know. There’s there’s some fun constructions you can get into where like if they’re like, you know, we think Austin Reeves would be really good here. It’s like we can actually send back size to the Lakers if you know, but you know, Reeves would have to get there, but you know, then you get into all right well now what are we sending back and are the Lakers going to be too weak in the back court, you know, around Luca? What does that look like? So, but there are, you know, fun uh constructions you could look at with them as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Keith, we’ve been talking for an hour and 11 minutes. Um, I really appreciate the time. I actually think this might be one of our shorter calls uh that we’ve had together because I think we’re closer to like 120 uh in in uh in times past, maybe 115. But this is great. Really enjoy the conversation. We didn’t have to break down the draft. We didn’t have to break down the draft. No, no, we didn’t have to get deep into draft prospects in the top 10. We didn’t have to talk about that and uh different trade scenarios with draft picks. We we we did okay. We kept this pretty solid and a lot of really good content for the Magic listeners to to get into. So, thanks again for joining the show. I really appreciate it. Let all the listeners know where they can find your work. And again, I’ll I’ll pin that in the post. I’ll say it in the opening, but it’ll be in the show descriptions as well on, you know, YouTube or the podcast feed. So, yeah, let them know where they can find you, Keith. Yeah. If you like this stuff and you want it on a bigger scale leaguewide spot track, all my written work, I’m in the middle of team offseason previews magical maybe next week, but it might be the week after, which is a good thing because we go in order of elimination. So that means they weren’t a lottery team and they weren’t out immediately um you know in the playing tournament. So So but those are going up. Uh we just started our free agent rankings. you know, could be of interest to Magic fans if you’re thinking, you know, who could be available around the non-t taxpayer or the taxpayer mid-level or or even a minimum type type signing. Um, those are up. The point guards went up. We’ll get the other positions up over the course of the next few weeks. Here’s we go. And then NBA front office show, Trevor Lane and I right now we’re three to five days a week. It depends on how much news is out there. Minimum three days. But we we do a lot of transaction talk and things like that there. And then I appreciate you mentioning off the jump uh sports business classroom if anybody’s really interested. We’re we’re running low on spots. There’s I think maybe like two threeish spots left to sign up for to to join us out in Las Vegas this summer. But uh if you go and you look it up sportsbusclassroom.com or just Google sports businessclassroom, it’ll pop up and think it’s a great program for you. Let them know you heard from NBA front office. Uh and then that helps us out a little bit too. knowing what’s driving the students to sign up. But yeah, that’s everything. Magic fans, definitely check out Spa Track. Like my web browser just autopop populates it for me now because I go there so often and it will help you really understand if you if you want more visuals to what you like maybe listen to on the podcast version, you’ll understand what we were talking about just by going to the magic homepage and clicking 2526 season. It’ll it’ll make a great adjustment for you. And then, yeah, we’re in transaction season. We’re in offseason mode. You got to be tuned in to the front office show. I listen to it throughout the year, but you definitely want to be tuned in pretty regularly during trade deadline time and then the off seasonason when new contracts are coming around, free agent signings are happening, trades, like this is the time to definitely not want to miss that content. So, Keith, once again, thanks for stopping by. And Magic fans, thanks for tuning in. Let’s go magic.