The Orlando Magic made it official Monday morning.
San Antonio Spurs associate head coach Sean Sweeney is the 16th head coach in franchise history. He will join the team at the end of the Spurs' run in the NBA Finals.
The team has finalized the biggest piece of its puzzle and is just waiting for him to come on board.
"We’re excited to welcome Sean [Sweeney] to the Orlando Magic family," president of basketball operations Jeff Weltman said in a press release. "Sean brings a tremendous work ethic and a high degree of intensity that set the tone for everything he does. Sean's attention to detail and his ability to communicate and teach the game clearly stands out. He's grounded in competitiveness and accountability, while also embracing a modern, creative approach to coaching."
Sweeney has built a reputation in the last 13 years as an assistant coach as a strong defensive mind and one of the best development coaches. Those are both things the Magic have valued in this rebuild. Sweeney doubles down on those principles.
Orlando should expect that Sweeney can build on the foundation left to him. This team should return to the top of the league in defensive rating. Even Weltman is not hiding from that.
But if there is trepidation about the Sweeney hire, it is whether he can fix the team's biggest issue: The offense.
The Magic finished 18th in offensive rating for a small improvement. Especially, because the team had not finished outside the bottom 10 in offensive rating since Dwight Howard's last year in 2012.
Still, the season was ultimately defined by a historically abysmal second half in Game 6. The team has to face that down and find some new offensive ideas just to stay afloat.
Sweeney's success will depend on implementing an offensive strategy that maximizes this team and gets them playing at a championship level.
So what kind of offense will he deploy?
Sweeney's offensive philosophy
It is hard to know exactly what kind of offense Sean Sweeney will run.
At the end of the day, he was an assistant coach. His job is to implement the head coach's vision -- whether that was Jason Kidd, Dwane Casey or Mitch Johnson.
As a head coach, Sweeney's offensive philosophy will take center stage. So what does he believe in?
In the early 2020s (while he was with the Dallas Mavericks), Sweeney put together a seminar on core principles for CoachTube that outlines some of what he thinks a basketball team should be.
They are all pretty generic to be applied to all kinds of teams. The headline in that seminar is his desire for his team to be the hardest-working, toughest team on the floor, something he can certainly build on with what Jamahl Mosley accomplished in Orlando.
He detailed his principles he thinks are important on offense: getting a great shot as soon as possible, passing and moving the ball to open shooters, and penetration into the paint.
Defining those is flexible.
Getting the best shot ASAP does not mean getting a shot up quickly or rushing into an offensive set. It means getting whatever the coach defines as a great shot -- whether at the rim, a star shot, a foul shot or an open three -- quickly and effectively.
This would suggest the Magic will run something more structured to find those shots rather than the read-and-react system they were running with Mosley that often times went away from players who might have had a hot hand.
It still starts with running and spacing the floor, Sweeney said. He wants his team to get the ball up the court quickly and space it effectively to pull the defense apart. Sweeney wants ball-handlers to be good decision-makers. Even with poor shooters, good spacing can still affect the defense and open lanes.
And the best passes are the penetrating passes. The ones that get into the paint to collapse the defense. And there will still be an emphasis on getting to the interior of the defense.
It sounds like Sweeney will design an offense based on quick decision-making and movement, keeping the ball and players moving to find open players.
That is a very Spurs-y way of playing. San Antonio is known for its offensive design that focuses on drive and kicks, and keeping everything in motion.
How the Magic fit these principles
The Orlando Magic implemented some of these changes this season.
Assistant coach Joe Prunty worked with Sean Sweeney in Milwaukee early in his career. Prunty helped redesign some of the Magic's out-of-bounds plays, and the team put an emphasis on getting out quicker and playing with better pace.
If there was one thing that transformed about the Magic's offense this year, it was its pace and ability to play in transition.
Orlando ranked 12th with 15.7 fastbreak points per game this season after ranking 25th with 13.8 points per game in 2025. The team was 12th with 21.8 transition possessions per game and 13th with 1.15 points per possession in transition. The Magic were 26th with 17.9 transition possessions per game in 2025 and scored 1.11 points per possession (24th in the league).
Orlando was playing a lot faster and getting shots up quicker.
Even the team's raw passing totals were up. Orlando went from 279.3 passes per game and 44.9 potential assists per game in 2025 to 290.4 passes per game and 44.6 potential assists per game in 2026.
There were good things in the offense.
There is still work to do to make this offense more purposeful and effective.
How that offense is structured and how the Magic get to those quality shots will ultimately be the question. That is the part nobody really knows.
Will he run specific sets to get the ball to spots or create advantages or will it feel like the read-and-react system the Magic are coming out of?
This will be the biggest mystery for Sweeney and the biggest question he will need to resolve. Nobody knows what kind of offense this Magic team will ultimately run under Sweeney.
