Magic extend GM Rob Hennigan's contract through 2018
The Orlando Magic are still trying to find their way in the post-Dwight Howard era, and while the past season sowed seeds of promise, the team's development has been painfully incremental.
In the three seasons since Howard's departure, the Magic have won, in order, 20, 23 and 25 games. Trending in the right direction, sure. But they're taking their sweet time about it.
Still, Orlando is giving its young general manager the opportunity to see things through with the young core he assembled. The Magic have finalized a contract extension for Rob Hennigan that will run through the 2017-18 season, CEO Alex Martins announced Thursday.
The initial deal Hennigan signed in 2012 - at the tender age of 30 - included a team option for 2015-16, which the organization exercised last May. He remains the NBA's youngest general manager.
"Under the leadership of Rob, we feel that we are positioning ourselves to be able to contend in a long-term, sustainable fashion," Martins said in a release. "We are proud of the work that Rob and our basketball operations department has done to this point and we look forward to taking the next steps in the process."
Hennigan, who engineered the (ostensibly successful) Howard trade as his first order of business on the job, had previously worked in the front offices of the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder.
Despite the slow progress, there's reason to believe the Magic are ready to take a more substantive leap. Their promising backcourt of rookie Elfrid Payton and sophomore Victor Oladipo was seriously frisky down the stretch of the regular season, recently extended 24-year-old Nikola Vucevic has blossomed into an excellent rebounder and terrific offensive center, and nobody quite knows what Aaron Gordon might be. The outline of a future stalwart is there.
Hennigan has a busy and important offseason ahead of him, with a tough decision to make regarding the restricted free agency of combo forward and third-leading scorer Tobias Harris, a projected top-five draft pick to ponder, and a head coaching hunt to orchestrate that could determine the direction of the franchise for the next half-decade.
No pressure.