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METAIRIE, La. (AP) — Jamahl Mosley sat comfortably at the end of a conference table at New Orleans Pelicans headquarters on Tuesday and suggested that his recent downfall in Orlando stemmed in no small part from how he handled success.
Mosley proved in five years with the Magic that he can take a collection of young players in a relatively small market and mold them into a playoff team. As New Orleans’ new coach, he’ll be expected to do that — and more.
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“As the team rises and expectations rise, that communication level needs to rise with it. And that accountability has to rise,” the 47-year-old Mosley said shortly after his introduction at team headquarters. “When you grow, you have to be willing to have the harder conversations as you get better and better and be OK with it.”
While Orlando made the playoffs in each of the past three seasons, it never won a series. This season, the Magic not only lost a 3-1, first-round playoff series lead to Detroit, but could not hold a 24-point, second-half lead at home in Game 6.
Joe Dumars, now entering his second year as Pelicans Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations, said he needed to discuss that collapse with Mosley.
“That’s the first thing we talked about,” recounted Dumars, a former NBA champion as a player and executive with Detroit. “I was like, ‘What the hell happened, man?’”
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Dumars said they spoke about Mosley’s message, his usage of timeouts, the tone with which he spoke to the players and “everything that you would want to know.”
Dumars concluded that Mosley handled it all professionally, and that it was just a bad day for a promising coach.
Orlando’s decision to fire Mosley after five years was “more the norm” in the NBA “than an outlier,” Dumars said.
“It’s just a natural course of the NBA,” he said, citing as an example New York Knicks coach Mike Brown, who has been a head coach with five franchises — twice with Cleveland.
“Five years, if you’re like, ‘We need to take another step,’ I get it,” Dumars said of the Magic firing Mosley. “People move on — and you pick up…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/pelicans-coach-jamahl-mosley-expects-235706328.html
Author : BRETT MARTEL
Publish date : 2026-05-26 23:57:00
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