ORLANDO, Fla. — The Magic terminated the contract of coach Jamahl Mosley on Monday after five seasons, President of Basketball Operations Jeff Weltman announced Monday.
The firing came after Orlando gave up a 3-1 lead in its first-round Eastern Conference playoff series with the Detroit Pistons. The Magic had a chance to clinch the series in Game 6 at home Friday after jumping to a 24-point lead early in the third quarter. They then missed 23 consecutive shots and lost the game 93-69, scoring only 19 points in the second half.
At a news conference Monday afternoon after the original announcement, Weltman said, “This morning, I met with coach Mosley and let him know that we were going to be making a change. We had a great talk, and as you would expect from Jamahl, he handled it with class and gratitude and appreciation. And I think it goes without saying that Coach is going to have a very successful NBA career in front of him. We wish nothing but the very best for he and his family.”
The average tenure with the same team for an NBA head coach is three to four years.
“It’s the hardest decision you have to make, especially for someone as talented and as great of a person as Jamahl is and everything he gave to the organization over the past five years,” Weltman said. “Obviously, we have lost in the first round in the last three years. And that is an organizational matter. That’s not on one person. But it just seems like it’s time for a new perspective, maybe a fresh voice and for us to all be able to get a fresh vantage point on what is going on with our team.”
In a statement, Mosley had kind words for both the organization and the fans.
“It has been an incredible five-plus years, and this organization and city will always mean so much to me and my family. In my heart, I truly hope that during our time here we were able to impact the players, staff, and the Magic organization in a meaningful and lasting way,” Mosley said. “I want to sincerely thank the DeVos family for the extraordinary opportunity to serve as head coach of the Orlando Magic. To our fans, there is nothing but love in my heart. The joy I had coaching this team, in this city, for the people who live here is something I will never forget. All I ever wanted was to make you proud to be Magic fans, and my journey here will certainly stay with me forever.”
The Magic went 189-221 (.461) during Mosley’s five regular seasons in Orlando. They advanced to the playoffs in three consecutive seasons, but lost in the first round each time. In two of those three playoff seasons, the Magic lost to a team coached by his good friend J.B. Bickerstaff.
Mosley had two years remaining on his contract after signing a four-year extension in 2024. Even before his firing, multiple media sources had reported that he was on the wish list of other NBA teams should he become available.
During his career in Orlando, the Magic won 22 games his first season as coach, 34 in his second season and then 47, 41 and 45, despite leading a team that saw some of its top players miss significant time to injury those past three seasons.
Under Mosley, the Magic went from a team that didn’t really have an identity and developed a reputation as a resilient team with a physical, tough defense. But the team defense dropped to 13th in defensive rankings in 2025-26, according to NBA.com. This season, Orlando set a franchise record with a 52-point loss to the Toronto Raptors on March 29. Then came the playoff loss at home on Friday, when Orlando led by 24 points early in the third quarter before losing by 14, a 38-point turnaround for the Pistons. The fans, who had been exuberant throughout the playoff run, booed as the game ended.
The Magic also struggled to score on a regular basis, despite having five players who were drafted out of lottery positions. They climbed to 15th in offensive scoring rankings this season but in Mosley’s previous four seasons, the team’s offense was ranked in the bottom six each season. In general, scoring seemed to be difficult for them.
The urgency to win was heightened this season after Weltman traded four first-round picks, a pick swap and guards Cole Anthony and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope to acquire shooting guard Desmond Bane from the Memphis Grizzlies. Bane did his part, playing in all 82 games and averaging 20.1 points and a 90.8 free-throw percentage. But he averaged the lowest number of three-point attempts since his rookie season and averaged a career second-lowest 3-point percentage of 39.1%.
Before coming to Orlando, Mosley had never been a head coach in the NBA. He started his NBA coaching career in Denver, where he was an assistant coach for player development for four seasons, starting in 2006-07. After that, he was an assistant coach for the Cleveland Cavaliers for four seasons and then was an assistant with the Dallas Mavericks for seven seasons.
A major question now is who will replace Mosley as head coach who will be able to help the team advance in the playoffs and try to achieve the goal that Weltman set at the start of this season — winning an NBA championship.
Weltman said he is not looking for a particular trait or quality in the next coach.
Factors would be “someone who looks at our team in the way we feel can help move us forward. Obviously, someone who understands where we are in our timeline, that we’ve kind of tried to get past the growth stages of the rebuild. And some of that is, maybe, stuff that we have to look at as a front office this summer.” Weltman said. “But I don’t have like a box to say, ‘We want our coach to come out of this sort of box’ — whether that’s experienced, x this. I’m not really sure. I think that’s more when you have really in-depth conversations with people about how they view our team, maybe see some things with our team that we haven’t seen and kind of go from there.”
Weltman said he did not have exit interviews with the players Monday, that he put his emphasis on the people directly affected by the coaching change.
Doc Rivers, Mike Budenholzer and Frank Vogel have won NBA championships and are not currently in a head coaching job. But Rivers and Vogel already have been among the Magic’s 15 head coaches. Billy Donovan led the Oklahoma City Thunder to the Western Conference Finals in 2015-16, when they lost to the Golden State Warriors. But Donovan, who mutually parted ways with the Chicago Bulls after this season, accepted the Magic’s head coaching job in 2007 after winning a second national championship as the University of Florida’s coach, and about a week later, he changed his mind and went back to Florida.
Weltman said several strong candidates have already reached out to him.
Another question is whether the roster is good enough to finish stronger.
After the Magic were ousted in Game 7 on Sunday night, a reporter asked forward Paolo Banchero in the postgame press conference if the roster is talented enough to advance in the playoffs.
“I can’t really answer that. You know I want to say yes, but we haven’t been out of the first round,” Banchero said. “So, if you’re going off the last three years, the answer is no. The nice answer would be yes, but honestly speaking, I can’t say that we’re good enough to be in the Finals or Eastern (Conference) Finals because the last three years we’ve had the same result.”
At his news conference Monday, Weltman said the team felt good about where it was when it went up 3-1, but that the injury to forward Franz Wagner during the series changed the dynamics against the No. 1 seed in the East.
He said the attributes the Magic have on the roster now are what teams look for when they construct playoff teams.
“I think that it’s our job to step back and look at what works and what doesn’t and to not throw the baby out with the bath water,” Weltman said.
He said he doesn’t want to put too much emphasis on either the first half of Game 6 or the last half of Game 6.
He said winning often comes down to margins and habits.
“We need to evaluate what happened,” he said.
The third major question for the Magic in the offseason is how they can change their roster to make it more successful.
“We’re always going to be looking to improve this team,” Weltman said. “I think we have gotten better….This year, when healthy, we were top 5 defense and top 10 offense, and we liked the trend that that presented. We liked where we thought that would take us.”
He said he is encouraged that when the core players have been on the floor together, they are elite.
“I don’t want to tear this thing down and dismantle it because of the way it ended — and certainly because of one half,” Weltman said.
The Magic are not going to lead the league in 3-point shooting and their defense drives their offense, he said. But the Magic want to round out the roster with shooting and skilled players, he added.
When the team was playing elite defensively this year, it elevated its offense, he said.
“That opens the door to some questions that our front office has to ask of itself this year about roster composition and how we, in the back end of our bench, supply ourselves with those things,” Weltman said.
The trade for Bane and the jump in Banchero’s salary next season in the first year of his extension will put the Magic over the salary cap and around the first apron, which restricts the type of moves they can make. Weltman had said at the trade deadline that any major moves they could make would cost them a core player (Banchero, Bane, Wagner and guard Jalen Suggs).
Weltman will be the one to make all these changes after his contract was quietly extended in December. Weltman, who has been president of basketball operations since 2017, will be seeking to hire his third coach.
He has built the current roster mostly with lottery picks in the NBA Draft. Weltman will not have a first-round draft pick in June after the trade to acquire Bane. The first player he drafted in the lottery was Jonathan Isaac, No. 6. His other lottery picks were Mo Bamba, No. 6 in 2018; Suggs, No. 5 in 2021; Franz Wagner, No. 8, also in 2021; Banchero, No. 1 in 2022; Anthony Black, No. 6 in 2023; and Jett Howard, No. 13, also in 2023. Other first-round picks were Chuma Okeke, No. 16 in 2019; Anthony, No. 15 in 2020; Tristan da Silva, No. 18 in 2024; and Jase Richardson, No. 25 in 2025.
Since he might need to make a trade, previous deals include acquiring center Wendell Carter Jr. and two first-round draft picks (who became Wagner and Howard) from the Chicago Bulls for Nikola Vucevic and sending Aaron Gordon and Gary Clark to the Denver Nuggets for guard Gary Harris, guard R.J. Hampton and a draft pick (who became Richardson).