Guard Jalen Suggs and the Orlando Magic have agreed on a five-year, $150.5 million contract extension within the hours earlier than Monday’s late-afternoon deadline for rookie-scale extensions, league sources confirmed to The Athletic.
The deal doesn’t embody any participant or staff possibility and is totally assured for the whole lot of the contract, a league supply instructed The Athletic.
The 23-year-old Suggs, initially drafted fifth total in 2021, rebounded from injury-hampered rookie and second seasons to make a major soar through the 2023-24 marketing campaign. He earned All-Defensive Second Group honors and helped the Magic end the common season with the league’s third-best defensive score.
On offense, he improved his exterior taking pictures, making a career-best 39.7 p.c of his 3-point tries.
He stated final season he hung out away from basketball in the summertime of 2023, which helped him clear his thoughts and reset his expectations for himself.
“I believe it’s very straightforward to lose your self if you grow to be such a product of your surroundings, and what you suppose the NBA life is, and who you’re purported to be as an NBA participant,” Suggs stated then. “You get caught in that blender of listening to you’re this or that, whether or not it’s social media, from household, from mates, coaches and various things like that. If somebody’s coming at you.”
One space the place Suggs might want to enhance is in working Orlando’s offense and bettering his assist-to-turnover ratio. However Magic officers count on Suggs to develop in that space, and forwards Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner are already liable for a lot of the staff’s ballhandling duties.
Wagner agreed to a maximum-salary extension through the offseason, and Banchero is prone to obtain a maximum-salary extension when he’s eligible for one through the 2025 offseason. Now that Suggs will earn a mean wage of $30 million per season, the Magic must take care in constructing out the remainder of their roster.
However staff officers in the end determined that they needed to maintain their promising younger nucleus intact and imagine their new funding in Suggs might be worthwhile long run.
ESPN was the primary outlet to report that Suggs and the Magic had agreed to a contract extension.
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