Guard Jalen Suggs and the Orlando Magic have agreed on a five-year, $150.5 million contract extension in the hours before Monday’s late-afternoon deadline for rookie-scale extensions, league sources confirmed to The Athletic.
The deal does not include any player or team option and is fully guaranteed for the entirety of the contract, a league source told The Athletic.
The 23-year-old Suggs, originally drafted fifth overall in 2021, rebounded from injury-hampered rookie and second seasons to make a significant jump during the 2023-24 campaign. He earned All-Defensive Second Team honors and helped the Magic finish the regular season with the league’s third-best defensive rating.
On offense, he improved his outside shooting, making a career-best 39.7 percent of his 3-point tries.
He said last season he spent time away from basketball in the summer of 2023, which helped him clear his mind and reset his expectations for himself.
“I think it’s very easy to lose yourself when you become such a product of your environment, and what you think the NBA life is, and who you’re supposed to be as an NBA player,” Suggs said then. “You get stuck in that blender of hearing you’re this or that, whether it’s social media, from family, from friends, coaches and different things like that. If someone’s coming at you.”
One area where Suggs will need to improve is in running Orlando’s offense and improving his assist-to-turnover ratio. But Magic officials expect Suggs to grow in that area, and forwards Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner are already responsible for much of the team’s ballhandling duties.
Wagner agreed to a maximum-salary extension during the offseason, and Banchero is likely to receive a maximum-salary extension when he’s eligible for one during the 2025 offseason. Now that Suggs will earn an average salary of $30 million per season, the Magic will have to take care in building out the rest of their roster.
But team officials ultimately decided that they wanted to keep their promising young nucleus intact and believe their new investment in Suggs will be worthwhile long term.
ESPN was the first outlet to report that Suggs and the Magic had agreed to a contract extension.
(Photo: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
