Anthony Black’s next contract is already becoming one of the more important decisions on Orlando’s board.
The Magic guard is heading into a season where his value, his role and his price tag all matter at once. Orlando’s offseason work looks close to finished, but the big unresolved item is Black, who is now in line for a crucial stretch with the team.
Jake Fischer flagged that exact issue on the latest episode of "NBA Insider Notebook with Jake Fischer," where he talked through extension-eligible players from the 2023 NBA Draft class. Black was part of that group, and Fischer pointed to Orlando’s challenge of finding a way to keep both Black and Suggs in the fold. He also sounded upbeat that a deal can get done.
Black will play the upcoming season on a $10.1 million club option, which the Magic exercised in October 2025, according to Spotrac. If nothing gets worked out before then, he would head into restricted free agency.
What makes the conversation so timely is how much Black changed last season. In his third NBA year, he played 64 games and started 40 of them, and his offensive leap was hard to miss.
His handles sharpened under former Magic assistant God Shammgod, and he became more comfortable creating his own shot. That translated into a jump to 15 points per game, plus a career night of 38 points in Orlando’s 127-126 win over the Denver Nuggets on Dec.
Shammgod is gone now, having left with Jamahl Mosley for the New Orleans Pelicans, so the next step falls on Black himself. He’s shown enough to look like a real piece of Orlando’s future, but this is also the kind of year where momentum matters. Extension talks are going to heat up, and any slip would make that picture a lot murkier.
There’s also the money side of it. Given his current role and production, Black is not expected to land the kind of payday some of his draft classmates have already secured. Amen Thompson of the Houston Rockets was the latest to cash in, signing a rookie-scale extension worth $208 million.
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