Orlando Magic fire general manager Rob Hennigan

The Orlando Magic fired general manager Rob Hennigan the day after their disappointing season ended, concluding a frustrating five-year rebuild.

The Orlando Magic have fired general manager Rob Hennigan, Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical reports. The team announced the firing shortly after and have named Matt Lloyd the interim general manager.

"“We appreciate Rob’s efforts to rebuild the team, but feel we have not made any discernible improvement over the last few years specifically,” Magic CEO Alex Martins told John Denton of OrlandoMagic.com. “It’s time for different leadership in basketball operations. We certainly wish Rob and his family well.”"

Hennigan spent five seasons as the team’s general manager trying to rebuild the organization from the ground up following Dwight Howard‘s departure. The team never really took any shape, accumulating a 132-278 record, a .322 win percentage. Orlando won more than 30 games just once in Hennigan’s five-year tenure.

It all culminated with the disastrous 29-53 season the Magic completed Wednesday.

Hennigan’s plan initially was to play a slow rebuild, using the draft to build back up the talent base. It would take at least two years of losing and learning while rebuilding the team’s prospects before being ready to take a step forward.

The first stage of the plan did not work out. The Magic never won the Draft Lottery, getting only a single top three pick through those early years of the rebuild, a second overall pick when the team was in line for the top pick thanks to owning the league’s worst record.

Orlando missed out on plenty of potential stars through this misfortune. The players the team did pick turned into solid players, but nothing transcendental. Victor Oladipo was arguably the closest thing the Magic had to an All-Star among those early draft picks. Aaron Gordon is still a raw player who has not quite taken a full, defined form in the league.

This was not the full depth of the team’s struggles, though.

Orlando Magic

Orlando hired Jacque Vaughn as the team’s first coach to grow with the team, as Hennigan described. But his teams struggled to look like they were taking steps forward. After he was fired following three seasons hovering around 25 wins, the Magic coaching situation became chaos.

Orlando hired former legend Scott Skiles and he did get the magic playing a higher level of basketball, garnering a 10-game improvement and 35 wins. But he suddenly resigned after the season. The Magic would have their fourth coach in three years, including interim coach James Borrego the year before. The team felt good that it hired Frank Vogel, but the turnover had some far-reaching effects.

This was not a good environment for a developing team.

And it became even worse as the pressure to win increased. Hennigan worked to remake the roster this past offseason thanks to the bevy of cap room and built a bigger team that was supposed to be strong defensively. It never came fully together.

Orlando floundered this year. And with so much promise publicly to make the Playoffs, the decision to move on became clear.

The Magic suffered a string of bad luck that hampered their rebuild for sure. But the results are also pretty evident too. Hennigan never put together a strong team around the pieces he had in place.

He collected assets and solid young players. But he then gave them away for seemingly pennies on the dollar to chase free agents. Orlando almost literally got nothing for Maurice Harkless, now starting for the Playoff-bound Portland Trail Blazers, and traded Tobias Harris for the cap room they created for this summer.

It is all marks against Hennigan on the docket. A docket that grew too large in the end.

Next: Frank Vogel stays positive as bleak season ends

The Magic’s disappointing season needed a fall guy. It was easy and probably right to blame the architect for the team. And so the Magic will head into this important offseason with a top-five lottery chance looking for new leadership and a new direction first.