ORLANDO, Fla. — After two consecutive first-round playoff exits, Orlando Magic president of basketball operations Jeff Weltman and coach Jamahl Mosley wanted to convey a singular message Thursday to the public and perhaps also to the players themselves.

“I think we’re ready to kind of walk into the next phase of our team, the next stage of our team,” Weltman said. “It’s more of a win-now philosophy, a win-now approach.”

Weltman made that declaration during his annual end-of-season question-and-answer session with local reporters. He also made similar comments earlier in the day during separate interviews with The Athletic and a morning show on the team’s radio flagship station.

As Mosley told reporters: “We’re not chasing mediocre.”

It made for a clear ramp-up in terms of rhetoric, and Weltman and his front office will have an entire offseason to attempt to turn those bold words into tangible action.

Orlando fought through an injury-ravaged 2024-25 season. Young stars Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner tore oblique muscles, forcing each of them to miss an extended stretch. Guard Jalen Suggs and sixth man Moritz Wagner suffered season-ending injuries. The team finished its regular season 41-41, won the Eastern Conference’s opening Play-In game and lost a hard-fought first-round playoff series to the defending champion Boston Celtics.

The primary task for Weltman and Mosley is to bring the team’s offense closer to the level of its defense. Orlando finished the regular season with the league’s second-ranked defense and the 27th-ranked offense — an offense marred by one of the worst 3-point shooting seasons in recent league history.

“Proven offensive help is what we’re going to be looking for,” Weltman said.

But how will Weltman seek to add that help, especially with the Magic currently projected to venture into luxury-tax territory in 2025-26 and with the punitive second apron not that far away? Complicating matters is that the large, long-term contract extensions Franz Wagner and Suggs already have agreed to will begin in the season ahead, and Banchero is all but certain to agree to a maximum-salary contract that would go into effect during the 2026-27 season.

In his interview with The Athletic, Weltman discussed this past season and the critical offseason to come. Here is that conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Do you regret not making a move at the trade deadline?

I’ve thought a lot about that. I try to always look myself in the mirror, and I know that just as our players and our whole organization needs to get better every day, so do I.

All I can say is we tried. We looked at ways of improving the roster, adding some depth heading into the playoffs, and we had to ask ourselves the question “at what cost?” Where the conversations went, I thought they had a chance to get executed. We were kind of on the same page with teams. We were literally in discussions into the last hour of the deadline, and both of those teams elected to retain their players and sit tight. That’s their prerogative.

So when I see the way that we came together after the deadline and I see the storm that we navigated and how we managed it and how we went into the postseason playing our best ball of the year, I feel we now have a better understanding of who we are as a team and what we’re going to try to accomplish this summer, and I’m glad to have all those (draft) assets in our back pocket. So I hope we did the right thing.

Were the options on the table at the deadline rentals?

Financially, we’re in a different place than we’ve been in in previous seasons, and I think sometimes you just associate the Magic with having all this cap flexibility. But the truth is, we’ve caught up to the rest of the league financially now as we pay our young players, and we no longer are separated from the league in that regard. We’re now just another team that has the same financial restrictions that the rest of the league has. A lot of the names that were being bandied about really weren’t realistic for us, so they weren’t even really on the board for us for financial reasons.

What we were more focused on were expiring contracts and ways to upgrade our roster through that, and the definition of that is those guys aren’t under contract next season. So again, at what cost do you pursue players that you’re not sure you’re going to be able to retain? That was part of the math that we were looking at.

Why was the team so far below the league average in 3-point shooting this past year, and why has it tended to struggle in prior years with its 3-point shooting?

That’s the $64,000 question. Obviously, the easy answer is we need to continue to add proven shooters to our team. But obviously, there’s a lot that goes into what makes a team a good 3-point shooting team. I can say that on paper, we were a much-improved shooting team. We knew that was one of our issues, and we hoped to address that last year, and on paper, coming into this season, we were a significantly improved 3-point shooting team.

But obviously, that wasn’t the result. That wasn’t what happened. We’ve looked at that from a lot of different perspectives. There are a lot of streams that feed that pool.

The previous season, we were an elite shot-quality team. This season, we were all over the board due to our injuries at different points of the season. We were high. We were low. We were literally last when Franz and Paolo were out of the lineup, and when they came back and our team found its footing the last part of the season after the All-Star break — from March 1 or so — we were first in the league in shot quality. That was reflected when our 3-point shooting bounced from 31 percent to 35 percent for the last part of the season. When you look at our team, that’s the historical aggregate percentage: We’re a 35 percent 3-point shooting team.

But we need to get better offensively, and a huge component of offense, obviously, is shooting. We know we need to improve there. We’re focused on that.

What unlocks that? Is it playmaking? Is it adding another shooter? Some of it, obviously, is having a healthy team and all of the above, and we’re looking at all of that. I don’t think it’s an easy answer, but it’s something that is priority one for us this summer.

Will the team consider adding a shooting coach?

We have a skills-development coach, and shooting is under his umbrella. We had a lot of inconsistencies this year through injuries and different lineups and rotations, and you don’t want to tinker too much with players’ strokes during the season. We have all the roles associated with a strong player-development department, including shooting coaches. We just need some time, and we need to look at all of these other streams that will make us better shooters. Internal improvement is one of them, and we will look for ways to improve all of our processes and all of our development streams. But some of it is internal. A lot of it may be external. That’s the summer’s work, for sure.

Does the team need a point guard?

I don’t know how you characterize the conventional term “point guard,” and, obviously, Paolo talked about getting a table-setter (a year ago). I look at it as shot creation, playmaking abilities to create advantages and maintain advantages. That’s what the league is really getting reduced to now, as offenses get more specialized and they try to carve out the weakest link defender. You’ve got to be able to have guys that can make plays off the dribble.

Does he have to be a point guard? I think there are a lot of different ways to do that, depending on who else is on your roster. But I think that Cory Joseph’s impact on our team late in the season showed the value for us of having someone that can get us into our stuff and organize us.

You don’t need me to remind you the Magic are projected right now to be in the luxury tax next season. Are you comfortable with that?

I haven’t even had that conversation (with ownership). I feel that a team has to earn its way into that conversation. You don’t see bad teams there, and so we have to earn our way into that conversation. I feel like we’re on the way there. These days, being in the tax is a lot more than just spending money. There are a lot of strategic restrictions that are associated with the different levels of tax and aprons and thresholds, and they can be very punitive, and they can really hamstring a team going forward.

It’s going to require a lot of fancy footwork for us starting this summer, as it does for all teams. That’s going to have to be part of what we navigate going forward. Because of that, I think for a lot of our roster upgrades we’re going to look at trades and swaps more than just adding players. That’s obviously going to be part of the landscape that we have to navigate going forward.

You led into my next question. How much of a concern is the second apron?

Both aprons are huge concerns for every team. They come with huge restrictions: not being able to take more money back than you’re giving up in a trade, and the use of your exceptions. There are so many different ways that teams get hamstrung, even just by going over the first apron. The second apron becomes very daunting because you’re talking about freezing draft picks years down the road and even bumping them down to 30 (in the draft order), which really limits your ability to navigate future planning.

So, yes, there are huge speed bumps, and every team has to be very mindful of them going forward. I don’t think anyone can really predict what the league is going to look like financially, what contracts are going to look like financially, for the rest of the life of the CBA.

How, then, in your case, can the team address its needs? Is it going to be primarily through trades?

We’ve been trying to thread that needle and develop our young guys and get better. Now our roster is starting to mature. This year kind of matured us, aged us, in a way, beyond our years, and we’re ready to look at the future of our team through a different lens now. Yes, all of those things will have to be considered. To your point, I think we’re going to have to look at more shuffling the roster than just adding to it.

If you find ways to do that — because it takes two teams or increasingly more than two teams to make a deal these days — how do you do that and retain the defensive identity that the team has built over a period of years?

That’s such a great question because, for all of the frustration that we have with our offensive struggles, the reason that we’ve been a good team — not good enough, not where we want to be — is because we always have that elite defense as our backbone, and we don’t want to compromise the DNA of our team as we look to improve offensively.

But that’s going to be a big part of our conversation, and that’s going to be part of what we have to navigate going forward. I’d rather start at a really elite level at one or the other before we start to look at how we balance the team than to be stuck in the middle on both sides of the board. I think we’re in a good place, knowing that we can probably spend a little defense on offense and still remain a very strong defensive team. But that’s going to be the balance that we have to keep an eye on, for sure.

I believe the Magic plus-one on all your first-round draft picks plus a pick swap. You also have 13 second-round picks.

That’s right. We have eight first-round picks over the next seven years, including two this year, and we do have that pick swap, which comes into play next season. Then we have the fifth- or sixth-most second-round picks in the league. As we saw the deadline, those picks are becoming increasingly valuable to help you navigate. It’ll behoove teams to have a bunch of those seconds in your back pocket, and we’re in pretty good shape there.

Which begs the question, could those be in play as you try to improve the roster?

I’m excited about this summer because I think this is the first time where I think I can really say nothing’s off the table for us. Is that going to take the form and fashion of a big deal or a small deal or a succession of small deals? We’ve been very protective of our assets and our young players. I think that this is the first season that we kind of enter into with really no discussion off the table. We want to get better now. We want to improve our team and get into the next stage of our development.

Across the league there are times when teams add assistant coaches to beef up certain areas. For example, the Clippers added Jeff Van Gundy to help improve an already good defense. Will the team seek to add an assistant coach to focus on the offense?

I haven’t even had that conversation with Coach Mose. I think we’re going to get through the first wave of closing up shop for the season. Within the front office, we’ve been talking a lot about this summer. We’ve been having meetings for weeks and months about this summer. … Coach and I will visit next week and discuss where we think we can get better. Like me, Coach Mose is going to look himself in the mirror, and he is going to look at our whole situation and try to come up with the best way to get better.

As I just said, for our team, nothing’s off the table. So, I really don’t know. We haven’t had those conversations yet. But I know that I want us to improve in a lot of areas this summer, and we’re going to be open-minded about however we do that.