Jeff Weltman Explains Reasoning Magic's Quiet Trade Deadline

ORLANDO, Fla. – Thursday, for a second consecutive season, the annual NBA trade deadline passed without a move from the Orlando Magic.

Although they were one of just four teams to stand pat, it wasn't for a lack of effort.

"I don't think we made a decision not to make a deal," Magic president of basketball operations Jeff Weltman told the Orlando Sentinel shortly after Thursday's deadline passed. "I think we were aggressive in seeking out what we thought could be equitable deals and they didn't shape up. Honestly, right now we’re kind of at the low point of the season with the way that we’re playing and when that happens, when that coincides with the trade deadline, teams are going to squeeze you.

"A lot of teams angled towards some of our long-term assets in return for short-term solutions to the team," Weltman continued. "In other words, moves we regarded as kind of ‘panic’ moves. And we don’t regard ourselves as having to panic right now. We think we're a very good team."

Orlando – sitting at 25-28 through 53 games and eighth in the East – has lost 14 of 19 games since 2025 began.

Dating back to December 1, Orlando is 11-21. That's only good for a .344 winning percentage, ranking 25th in the NBA.

After breaking through for a 47-win campaign and No. 5 seed in the East playoffs a season ago, Orlando finds itself in Play-In contention entering the final third of the regular season. The Magic trail No. 6 Miami, who occupies the last certain playoff seed, by two games and is 2.5 ahead of No. 10 Chicago, currently residing in the last Play-In spot.

Much of their struggles, Weltman said, can be credited to injury. To his point, Orlando players have missed 166 total games due to injury or illness before Saturday's home matchup with the San Antonio Spurs – already nine more than all of last year.

Of those, 34 belong to 2024 All-Star Paolo Banchero and 20 to Franz Wagner because of torn right obliques, and 18 belong to Jalen Suggs due to hamstring, back and quad ailments.

Not only does that trio comprise Orlando's best players and leading scorers, but also the Magic's core of the future. Yet, they've played just six of 53 games in 2024-25.

They've won four of them.

"When you factor in the significance of players – so not just to say who’s lost the most games to injuries – but who’s lost the most significant players to games in injuries? By our metrics, we rank third in the league, right behind New Orleans and Philadelphia. Those two teams are kind of recalibrating their season a little bit. We’ve kind of remained in the fight. We’re still in the hunt for the playoffs and I’m proud of our guys for forging through what’s been a significant wave of injuries to really important players.

"We didn’t feel it was the right thing to do to part ways with significant assets just to kind of plug holes and put a band-aid on something. We will assess the team, we’ll understand how best we need to look going forward and, in order to execute that, we will keep all of the arrows in our quiver."

Regardless of injury, among the needs Orlando maintains is improved shooting, an issue Weltman described as "persistent."

Thursday evening's 22-point blowout loss to the Denver Nuggets is not only the most recent example of their shortcomings, but perhaps the most glaring. The Magic made just five of 31 threes and shot just 36.9 percent from the field while Denver drilled 12 of 30 triples and shot 53 percent from the field.

Including that game, Orlando is last in the NBA in three-point accuracy (30.3), effective field goal percentage (50.2) and points per game (103.8).

"I do feel that for whatever reason our team is populated with pretty good career shooters who are just underperforming to their career numbers," Weltman said. "Part of that is when you lose a good portion of your shot creation, the quality of your shots is going to be affected as well. It goes hand-in-hand with a lot of things. It’s the shots that we’re getting, the shot-creation, the pressure that it puts on guys and obviously it’s affected our confidence.

"That being said, I’m not saying we have the best shooting team in the league but I don’t think our shooting numbers are representative of the shooters that we have on this team," Weltman added.

They are 29th in offensive rating (107 points per 100 possessions) and play at the NBA's second-slowest pace. While Orlando's defense maintains a top-three ranking, allowing only 108.9 points per 100 possessions, the Magic's offense has been unable to capitalize.

That issue predates this entire Magic roster. The last time Orlando wasn't in the bottom-third of the NBA in offensive rating was 2011-12.

"We did look, we were quite aggressive, I’ll say," Weltman said. "I thought we had a couple deals, maybe, lined up that could cross the finish line."

But adding a shooter that doesn't do other things well has the potential to diminish other aspects of the team, Weltman said, and that challenge becomes harder when factoring the injury-ravished nature of his team.

"Look, obviously that’s an issue that we know we need to address, but it’s also something that we’ve kind of advanced without through the last couple of years from 34 [wins] to 47 and kind of tracking to win more than that before we did experience this wave of injuries. But these are all things — shooting obviously front and center — that we know we’re going to need to address.

"The question is, do you nibble now and give up long-range assets, or do you wait and see how this thing looks once again when healthy and then really seek to make more significant moves with all of your assets in your pocket?”

Orlando's current roster was constructed organically. Of the 17 players signed under contract (15 standard and two two-way deals), only two were acquired via trade: Gary Harris and Wendell Carter Jr. in deals at the 2021 deadline that helped kickstart the Magic's rebuild.

The rest have either been drafted and developed in-house or signed during free agency.

"We’ve talked a lot about the youth of our team and that we’re invested in developing these young players," Weltman said. "And we’ve kind of been very careful not to step on their development, which doesn’t always look great, but that’s kind of what we need to do to find out how we walk into the next phase of what this team is going to look like."

Young players like Tristan da Silva, whom Weltman told the Sentinel they fielded calls on leading up to the deadline, and Anthony Black have been selected in the past two drafts and been relied upon to contribute. Banchero was the No.1 pick in 2022, and Wagner and Suggs were each picked in the top-8 of the 2021 draft.

Weltman reasoned there would come a point where an assessment of what's needed for the Magic to advance to the next phase and turn the corner. Whenever that time comes, whether in the offseason or otherwise, Orlando has a stockpile of flexible contracts and future draft capital to potentially deal.

In his eighth season with the team, the Magic's lead decision-maker looks forward to doing so. That excitement, however, didn't entice him to make a rash move as the season's homestretch fast approaches.

"For a young team where we really haven’t recruited over the young guys and brought in a whole bunch of free agents or traded first-round picks yet, any of that stuff, they’ve got our fanbase excited. And they’ve got us excited ... We want to go for it but we also have to be understanding about when the right time to do that is, when the right deals present themselves, and it just didn’t happen to be this deadline."

Three games remain before the All-Star break, and 10 of the next 11 games total come at the Kia Center. The first of which comes Saturday against De'Aaron Fox, Victor Wembanyama and the new-look San Antonio Spurs.

Orlando's group for the matchup, and every one going forward through this year, is what it is.

"I want to project this out to our fans, we’re OK. We’re in a very good position right now. I know that we had a really great start to the season and I feel like that’s who we are ... our young guys are going to get better and better and better, and we have all of our assets in our pocket. We didn’t jump [at Thursday's deadline] because we felt that the right deals didn’t present themselves [and] that the timing of the trade deadline kind of coincided with us being in a little bit of a slump, kind of generated a little bit of a squeeze effect where the league looks to squeeze long-term assets for short-term solutions.

"I think there are some teams that are in positions where they kind of need to make moves like that and we don’t count ourselves as one of those teams. We count ourselves as a growing team and we’re going to continue to grow. I remain very excited about where this team is headed.”