ORLANDO, Fla. — As the calendar flips to June and The 2024 NBA Finals begin on Thursday, the Orlando Magic and other NBA teams are turning their attention to how they can get their teams better for the 2024-25 season.

It's been about a month since Magic players, coaches and front-office executives gathered for the final time of the 2023-24 season, and almost everyone scattered almost immediately to clear their heads and rest their bodies after a successful season that saw the team advance to the playoffs for the first time since 2020 and push the Cleveland Cavaliers to seven games before finally getting knocked out.

But if the Magic are to build on their recent success, the players, coaches, scouts, front-office executives and staffs must get back to work.

This summer will be the most important to the Magic since the players in their last Finals team began to break up in 2012. The team has found a core of players, led by power forward Paolo Banchero and forward Franz Wagner, who proved this year that they are good enough to make the playoffs and offer hope that they are just beginning to climb the playoff rankings. But teams can sometimes find it more difficult to improve after they make the playoffs than it was getting to the postseason.

As President of Basketball Operations Jeff Weltman pointed out after exit interviews on May 6, teams can improve in the offseason through the NBA Draft, free agency, trades and player development.

Weltman has taken a strategic, methodical approach to building the Magic into what they are today. After the trades of Nikola Vucevic, Aaron Gordon and Evan Fournier in 2021 that tore down the roster and launched yet another rebuild, Weltman has mostly added players through the draft and sprinkled in some key veterans with playoff experience to help point the young players in the right direction. They included guard Gary Harris, who the Magic acquired in the Gordon trade, and forward Joe Ingles, who was signed as a free agent. He added young center Wendell Carter Jr. in the Vucevic trade with the Bulls. He also took a chance on guard Markelle Fultz, a former No. 1 pick plagued by injuries early in his career, and signed free-agent forward/center Moe Wagner, who had not stuck with his previous teams primarily because of their own rebuilding processes. Weltman avoided making trades that would cost the Magic their future draft picks and planned contracts in a way that encouraged the development of incoming young players and retained the Magic's salary-cap flexibility so he could continue to make the roster better.

The patience paid off the past two seasons. The Magic won 12 more games in the 2022-23 season than they had won in 2021-22 under first-year coach Jamahl Mosley. They won 13 more games in the just-completed season than in 2022-23 and advanced to the playoffs.

The Magic mostly left their roster unchanged in 2023-24, allowing forward Bol Bol to leave and adding Ingles, relying primarily on continuity and internal development to get better. That doesn't always work, though.

The Sacramento Kings tried that in the just-completed season after improving significantly and making the playoffs for the first time in 16 years in 2022-23. This season, the Kings won two fewer games and missed the playoffs.

After fighting so hard every night to win games this season, the Magic won't surprise any opponents next season, and some teams they beat may be looking to get back at them. Some Eastern Conference opponents with young stars have made big trades or added free agents in the past couple seasons — like the Cavaliers, Pacers and Knicks — and made it deeper into the playoffs this season than Orlando. The seven playoff games against the Cavs also exposed some of the Magic's weaknesses, including inconsistent scoring and 3-point shooting.

Continuing to build on 47 wins next season likely will require a more aggressive approach to team building for the Magic this summer.

Three of their key draft picks are approaching free agency, which will cut significantly into the salary-cap flexibility they have had. Franz Wagner and guard Jalen Suggs are eligible for contract extensions this summer and Banchero will be next summer. This could be the last offseason the team has significant cap room to add players from outside the organization to help the team continue to climb the playoff standings.

“We have young players who are extension-eligible, and that all gets layered into free agency and the draft. Obviously, we want to try to keep together our core and build, not subtract. That said, I’ve told you guys for a while now, cap space is great. But this is coming at all of us, especially with the new CBA (collective bargaining agreement with the National Basketball Players Association). We have a lot of hard decisions to make coming up. That starts this summer.

“We’ll obviously engage with the representatives for the players who are extension-eligible. We’ll be hopeful that we can come to some kind of agreement. But we’ll go forward and do the best that can do and continue to grow the team that we have.”

Now, Weltman and General Manager Anthony Parker must also continue to help the roster make strides without disrupting the defensive identity the team has established or the togetherness and chemistry the Magic had this past season. It would be surprising to see any major roster shakeups based upon the way Weltman has operated so far and what he said after the exit interviews in May.

“As the team continues to improve, we’ve been very intentional about keeping a pathway for all of our young players to grow and develop. And obviously, we believe in all these young guys or they wouldn’t be here. That said, the bar gets raised a little bit as you start to win games. So, those will be part of the discussions that we have about improving our team, how much of that can come internally. We don’t want to lose the North Star of our team, which is that our three leading scorers are 22 and under.

“I know there are a lot of good things that happened to our team this year. Now, it’s up to us to earn our way into repeating that. And we don’t take that for granted. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to keep our place held, and then we build from there. So, those will be part of the discussions."

The work has already begun. 

Even as the playoffs continued, front-office executives and coaches gathered for the NBA Pre-Draft Combine in Chicago on May 12-19. At that camp, NBA staff took official measurements of prospective draft picks such as height, weight, standing reach, wingspan and hand size. They also split many of them into teams and watched them play games against each other. Separately, they put them through drills that measured skills such as standing vertical jump, maximum vertical jump, bench press, three-quarter-court sprint time and lane agility time.

Just as important, the camp gives team executives the opportunity to begin early discussions about possible future trades because all of the front-office personnel are gathered together in one place.

Current players are going back to work, too. After going away on vacations or visiting with family and friends, many athletes no longer playing in the postseason have started to return to their teams' practice facilities to get in workouts to try to further develop their skills. Just this past week, the Magic posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, photos of forward Jonathan Isaac and guard Jett Howard getting up shots in the AdventHealth Training Center. 

At exit interviews, Howard said he planned to spend the offseason working on his defense and his shooting, and he said he wants to play on the Magic's Summer League team in July. He spent most of this past season playing with the Osceola Magic but said he felt that helped him get ready to play in the NBA and that the G League team teaches the same schemes that the NBA team uses. If all goes as planned, Howard could give the Magic more shooting options next season before they add any other players.

First-year guard Anthony Black, who started many games for the Magic early in the season when Fultz was injured, said at exit interviews that he expects to spend much of the summer in the gym and weight room in Orlando, working on his body and his game.

Banchero said he planned to get back to the basics of his game after spending a busy summer last year with Team USA at the FIBA World Championships.

The Wagner brothers, who were key players for the German team that won the world championships, will be back with that team this summer, trying to win a gold medal for Germany at the Paris Olympics. Ingles will play in Paris with Australia, and center Goga Bitadze will be there with Georgia, too.

The offseason schedules for team executives and the coaching staffs already are getting busy. They are holding workouts for potential draft picks leading up to the NBA Draft on June 26-27. The Magic have two draft picks this year, No. 18 in the first round and 47th in the second round. It's unclear if the Magic will use their picks or trade them. This season's draft is not considered by many NBA talent evaluators to be as strong as in recent years, and the draft is a time when significant trades often are made. In addition, the Magic had a full roster with a lot of young players that needed to develop already and didn't have much playing time to give Howard. They could decide it's not in their best interests to add another young player or two.

Part of their reasoning about what to do in the draft could depend on their other plans for the offseason, who will be back and who will leave.

The day after the NBA Finals end, teams can begin negotiating with their own free agents. The last possible date of the NBA Finals is June 23.

The Magic have three players — Fultz, Harris and Bitadze  — heading into unrestricted free agency, meaning they can sign with any team with which they reach a contract agreement. Under the CBA rules, other teams can start negotiating with them as of 6 p.m. ET June 30. Guard/forward Caleb Houstan's contract for next season is not yet guaranteed. Isaac's contract also is not fully guaranteed until Jan. 10, 2025 because he missed so much time to injury prior to this season, but the Magic could guarantee it before then.

On June 29, two days after the draft, the Magic have a deadline on whether to pick up their second-year options on the contracts of Ingles and Moe Wagner. It's important to note that even if they don't, they still could re-sign those players during the free-agent period. That also is the deadline for them to make a qualifying offer on free-agent forward Chuma Okeke, and if they don't, he becomes an unrestricted free agent.

After the free-agent negotiating period opens June 30, the Magic and all other teams can begin negotiating with free agents who were not on their roster at the end of last season. That process can continue up until the season starts, but most of the top free agents usually sign within two or three days after NBA rules allow them to do so on July 6. The Magic are expected to focus their free agency efforts on finding a shooter or a point guard, or a player who is a combination of both.

The Magic also could agree to trade for a player from another team to meet their needs.

Weltman said the current roster still has plenty of room to grow, which means he also could decide not to make many changes at all. 

“I think we have a lot of needs," Weltman said. "I know that the most publicly highlighted need, if I were to ask, would probably be shooting. But I think that there are a lot of different ways to address shooting even. I look at some of our guys I would say had down shooting years that I would expect to be better. I think that is part of our internal growth. Obviously, we can add free agents. We can draft players. I will say this, for whatever it’s worth, since Jan. 1, we were the 14^th, I believe, 3-point percentage team in the NBA. So, I don’t believe we are totally bereft of shooting.

"I think some of this is guys grow up; they get better, they find their rhythm. When you have a team as young as ours, when we talk about player development, this is part of developing a player, is shooting. They get better the longer they are in the league. It’s a pretty linear chart in that respect. So, I do feel that it’s an area that we want to look to get better. But not at the expense of the things that cost us our DNA. There is a reason we were a good team this year, and we don’t want to lose that.”

All teams must work within league salary-cap rules. The league won't announce next season's salary cap until closer to free agency, but projections have put it at about $141 million, which would be up from about $136 million in 2023-24.

The amount of salary-cap space the Magic will have this summer will depend upon how many of their own free agents they re-sign and whether they release rights to others. They are expected to be one of the only teams with significant cap space this summer. They could have from about $25 million to up to $60 million, though they would have to renounce rights to all their free agents and to players under non-guaranteed contracts to get to the high end of that number. It would be a surprise if they released negotiating rights to all those players.

Weltman also plans to keep in mind how much the cap will grow in future seasons and how any long-term additions to the team fit the timeline of the current players. Because the Magic's contracts for Franz Wagner, Suggs and Banchero will jump significantly in the next two years, more than the salary cap, they likely will not want to commit to free-agent contracts this summer that will prevent the team from making changes in upcoming seasons.

“Cap space can be used in an array of ways, and I’m not exactly sure yet how we’ll look to target our needs," Weltman said. "Sometimes it can be done through trades; it can be done through draft. Obviously, when I stood here last year, I talked about internal growth. If you think about what we’ve done this year, we added Joe Ingles and two rookies, and we went from 34 to 47. So there are a lot of different ways to address improvement.

“Obviously, cap space is an instrument that we have at our disposal this summer. It won’t be there forever. But it has to be used wisely, and it has to be used with future planning in mind. So, those will all be things we discuss when we regroup, and it’s all layered into kind of getting ready for the draft and then free agency right behind that. And it’s all so close together these days that it’s one big mess.”

The last official event on the NBA calendar is Summer League in Las Vegas from July 12 to July 22. At Summer League, new draft picks and other young players on their rosters that franchise executives want to incorporate are teamed up with a group of free agents to play games. It's the first chance for new draft picks to start to learn their teams' systems and get to know their coaching staffs and for teams to see how their new additions fit into those systems.

All NBA organizations send teams to Summer League. So it also brings together all teams' coaching staffs and front offices once again, giving any team executives still looking at making roster adjustments a time to discuss trades or contract signings face to face in a low-pressure environment. Trades and free-agent signings can continue all summer.