ORLANDO — After the 2023-24 season, Orlando Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley finished second in voting for the NBA’s Coach of the Year award.

The reasoning? Orlando pieced together a 47-win campaign and returned to the postseason for the first time in four years. For a Magic team that improved upon its win total for the third consecutive season, Orlando hopes it’s a sign of more good things to come.

When the Magic began constructing this core, they selected Mosley as the coach to lead them. Mosley had started in player development and advanced scouting with the Denver Nuggets in the mid-2000s, then served assistant roles for three NBA teams (Denver, Cleveland and Dallas). But he never manned the sideline himself.

Mosley since has been given the runway to grow as a coach while his team grows around him. From 22 wins in Season One to 34 in Season Two, then 47 last year, the progression has been steady with Mosley on the sidelines.

But has the Magic’s success garnered enough attention?

A CBS ranking of the 30 NBA head coaches released on Monday slotted Mosley as the NBA’s 19th-best head coach, in a tier with Kenny Atkinson of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Willie Green of the New Orleans Pelicans that is titled, “You look promising, but it’s still a tad early.”

Of teams that made the playoffs and retained their head coach from last year into this one, only Doc Rivers (No. 22) and Green (No. 20) ranked lower than Mosley.

According to the rankings, the criteria for the evaluations include:

Orlando was a franchise spinning its wheels and in search of any semblance of positive trajectory when it hired Mosley. Since then, with the help of more thought-out roster construction, the Magic have been a team in ascendancy.

Over the summer, Mosley was selected as the head coach of the USA Men’s Basketball Select Team, leading a group of players with bright futures to scrimmage against the eventual gold-medal-winning U.S. Men’s National Team. Joined by guard Jalen Suggs, the Magic were well represented in the first three days of the Las Vegas minicamp.

The Magic’s collection of young talent is impressive, and should they continue to improve, they’ll find themselves in contention for the East’s upper-flight for years to come. But while the talent is apparent, proper coaching is still required to draw the best out of it.

“Jamahl Mosley took one of the youngest teams in the NBA last season and made it a defensive juggernaut,” wrote Sam Quinn, the author of the rankings. “Yes, the talent in Orlando is well-suited to that, but getting young players to buy in defensively is harder than it looks.”

Quinn laid out the concerns surrounding the Magic, many of which are valid. Orlando’s offense still has yet to dig itself out from the bottom 10 of the NBA, a spot they’ve been tethered to for the past 12 seasons. For as tough as the Magic make it on other teams to score and operate on offense, they’ve struggled just as well.

But the promising signs are there. Mosley’s track record as a head coach is short, but so far positive. Missing are real expectations of where the Magic should be – not through any fault of Mosley’s, but because the Magic haven’t had high hopes for the better part of the previous decade.

Player development has been a solid area for the Magic, but many of their young players right now were former high draft picks, so their progressions might be viewed as expected. Whether one of them is able to over-perform on said expectations would likely earn more notice.

Are Mosley’s best attributes in those areas enough to push him ahead of other coaches in a ranking like this? As the article states, the exercise is inherently flawed in the first place. Criteria, past precedent and judgment are all in the eyes of the beholder. One person’s rankings will be completely different from the rest.

Yet, one could easily argue that a leader who was voted by those around the league as the runner-up for the Coach of the Year award in his third season and who hasn’t yet taken a backward step should slot higher into a ranking of all 30 NBA coaches.

Then again, a Coach of the Year award is no guarantee. Dwane Casey was notoriously fired in the same season that he won the award in 2018. The same happened to George Karl in 2013.

What the award does signify, however, is that Orlando’s progress is, in part, due to the growth of its head coach. Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigenault, the Coach of the Year winner, placed 6th in the rankings.

The Magic are primed to shake their “rebuilding” label this season because any absence from the playoff picture would be a shock. When Mosley was first hired, such a scenario was long from becoming a reality.

The main thing Mosley can do as the head of the Magic is to keep winning and excelling at his job until others have no choice but to take notice.

Or, as Quinn lays out in his reasoning: “If Mosley can overcome the shooting and ball-handling limitations on that roster, though, he’s going to skyrocket up this list.”

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