The Magic are keeping Jamal Cain in the fold.
Orlando exercised Cain’s $2.58 million club option for the 2026-27 season ahead of Monday’s league-wide deadline, the team announced Monday. If the Magic had passed, Cain would have hit unrestricted free agency Tuesday at 6 p.m., when NBA teams are allowed to start negotiating with players from other clubs.
Instead, Cain is set to stay with Orlando after first landing with the team last summer on a two-way contract. He later earned a standard deal in March for the rest of the season, and that contract included a second-year team option.
That option is non-guaranteed now and becomes fully guaranteed on Jan. 10, 2027, according to Spotrac.com.
Orlando’s move comes as free agency gets underway and after the team waived veteran forward Jonathan Isaac over the weekend. The Magic now have four standard-contract roster spots open and are about $2.8 million above the first apron, with a projected $9.8 million in room below the second apron.
Cain, 27, gave Orlando exactly the kind of depth piece teams lean on when the games tighten up. He became a multi-use defender who could check different positions and hit open 3s on the other end.
The 6-foot-7 forward logged a career-high 40 regular season NBA games and averaged 9 points, 3.6 rebounds and 1.2 assists while shooting 38% from three over the final 17 games. He then played in all seven of Orlando’s first-round playoff games against the Pistons and started the final three after Franz Wagner suffered a right calf strain in Game 4.
Before becoming a full-time piece for the Magic, Cain put up 20.1 points, 2 assists, 1.4 steals and 1.2 blocks in 32.8 minutes per game across nine G League contests with Osceola as a two-way player.
His NBA path has been built the hard way. Cain spent his first three professional seasons on two-way contracts, appearing in 81 NBA regular season games with Miami and New Orleans before signing with Orlando.
At the college level, he played 150 games over four seasons at Marquette from 2017-21 and one season at Oakland University in 2021-22. As a fifth-year senior, he was named Horizon League Co-Player of the Year and made the Horizon All-League First Team.
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For Orlando, the trade was part of a longer search for a new direction after the promise around McGrady and Grant Hill never fully materialized. Hills injury struggles left that partnership short of its ceiling, while McGrady went on to put up big production in Houston and help lead the Rockets to multiple postseason trips. The intriguing part of the story is how close that era came to becoming something bigger, only to keep running into the same wall when the stakes got highest. [Read more 🡒]