New coach familiar with Orlando
Orlando turns to veteran coach to lead rebuilding franchise
Steve Clifford, the former Charlotte Hornets coach and ex-Magic assistant to Stan Van Gundy, addresses reporters Wednesday after being named the team’s fifth coach since the 2014-15 season.
Steve Clifford engineered a major turnaround once before.
Now the Orlando Magic hope he will do the same for them.
The Magic hired Clifford as their new coach Wednesday, signing him to a four-year contract to help transform the franchise from a perennial doormat to a contender.
“I’m not betting on something that I don’t know,” said Jeff Weltman, the Magic’s president of basketball operations. “Steve Clifford has proven himself to be an elite-level NBA coach in addition to having great personal skills, player-development abilities [and] all the organizational bullet points that we had hoped to address.”
The Magic had been searching for a coach since April 12 when Weltman fired Frank Vogel just hours after the team completed its 2017-18 season with the league’s fifth-worst record, 25-57.
Clifford’s résumé includes a five-year stint on Stan Van Gundy’s coaching staff during the Magic’s most recent heyday from 2007-12 and a five-year run as the Charlotte Hornets’ head coach from 2013 through this past April.
Charlotte was one of the league’s worst teams before it hired Clifford, going 7-59 and 21-61 in the two years before his arrival. But in his first season with the team, it improved to 43-39 and reached the playoffs.
“As much as anything else, it’s always going to get back to getting the most out of people, having a way to play as a team that makes sense for this league,” Clifford said during his introductory press conference Wednesday afternoon. “This league constantly changes. This year was different than last year.
“You have to be on top of that. A lot of study goes into it.”
Weltman led the Magic’s coaching search — a search that confounded many NBA team executives and industry insiders because of its extended length and its secretive nature.
Weltman kept the process hush-hush from start to finish and asked potential candidates and their agents to remain mum, too.
Even before Vogel was fired, the