Magic guard Jalen Suggs isn’t afraid to unleash his football mentality on the basketball court.
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ORLANDO, Fla. — A scar runs along Jalen Suggs’ upper left arm. The size and shape of a medium Band-Aid, darker than the surrounding skin, it stretches across an area between his shoulder muscle and his triceps. The Orlando Magic guard’s lifetime in sports has left him with many marks on his body, but that one holds a special significance. It reminds him of his football career.
“I like all my scars,” Suggs said after a recent practice. “They all kind of tell stories. But I love the game of football. I’m forever thankful for what it’s taught me.”
In 2017, Suggs, then a sophomore quarterback for the SMB Wolfpack, carried the football during an intense high-school rivalry game and absorbed what he thought was a routine tackle. He did not feel anything unusual. After he stood up, he gathered his teammates for a huddle, and his teammates pointed to his left arm. Suggs looked down to see that his arm had been gashed open and was dripping blood. His teammates implored him to receive immediate medical attention. They ran one more play, and then Suggs went to the sideline, where athletic trainers patched the injury. Suggs returned to that game.
“Teams knew how good he was, and they often wanted to test his toughness and take shots at him and beat him up,” said Hugh Brown, who was the Wolfpack’s quarterbacks coach in 2017 and is now the head coach. “He never backed down from it.”
Brown and his fellow SMB coaches describe Suggs as the ultimate connector and a dogged competitor, someone who reveled in the sport’s physicality and felt such a deep obligation to his teammates that he would attempt to play hurt.
Suggs’ attitude has not changed. Although the compression shirt he typically wears underneath his Magic jersey covers his upper left arm during games, you do not need to see his gnarly scar to realize that he remains a football player at heart. He seeks contact, relishing opportunities to crash passing lanes, take charges and dive onto the basketball court. As Orlando’s starting point guard, he enjoys hurling long outlet passes almost as much as he enjoyed throwing long touchdown passes.
Suggs is a central reason the Magic lead their Eastern Conference first-round series against the equally defensive-minded Detroit Pistons 3-2. Suggs set the tone for the series in the opening quarter of Game 1, disrupting Pistons passes, sinking a pair of 3-pointers and belly-flopping to the floor to collect a loose basketball.
When the series resumes Friday for Game 6 in Orlando, with the Magic desperate to close it out and avoid a winner-take-all Game 7 on Sunday on the Pistons’ home floor, Suggs almost certainly will be in the middle of the action again, imbuing his teammates with a level of frenetic energy that he provides naturally. Even when he struggles on offense, he improves Orlando’s defense. Like the ball-hawking, hard-hitting NFL defensive backs he has always admired, he anticipates opponents’ passes.
Suggs also craves collisions. He excels at beating opponents to spots on the floor, sometimes wrecking dribble-handoffs before a big man can give the ball to a guard or anticipating picks.
“He’s just so good at getting in-between,” Magic forward Paolo Banchero said. “I guess he’s not afraid of that contact, which is sort of what you would see in a football player. Most basketball players don’t have that natural instinct to do that, and he does.
“I don’t think I’ve played with anybody like Jalen. It’s hard for me to think of anyone (like him) or try to compare him to anyone. He’s a pretty unique player, just how he puts his body on the line, gives his body up, diving on the floor, diving out of bounds, going for chase-down blocks.”
Suggs, who is 6 feet 5 and 212 pounds, is the most irreplaceable defender on a team filled with tall, agile and tough defenders. During the 2023-24 season, his third year in the pros, he earned a spot on the NBA All-Defensive Second Team. In recent years, he has ranked near the top league-wide among point guards and combo guards in block percentage, steal percentage and defensive-rebounding percentage.
It’s no wonder, then, that when Suggs missed the 2025 postseason because he had undergone knee surgery, many people within the Magic conceded that their team had only a minimal chance to upset the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics, a team with several outstanding perimeter scorers. The Magic lost that series in five hard-fought games for many reasons, but one of them was Suggs’ absence.
His penchant for contact has its negative side. It has made him vulnerable to injuries, and he has endured two surgeries during his pro career. In 2022, his rookie season ended early because of a slight stress fracture in his right ankle. During a season-ending arthroscopic surgery late last season, a physician removed a cartilage fragment within his left knee and performed a mosaicplasty procedure to repair the trochlear joint surface.
Suggs’ Magic coaches and teammates recognize the risks of his physicality, but they have largely refrained from asking him to rein in his football mentality on the basketball court.
“To hold him back from being who he is, we won’t do that,” coach Jamahl Mosley said. “Obviously, being able to be smart in certain situations? Absolutely. But you’ll never hold him back from who he’s always going to be as a basketball player. …
“That’s like asking someone with superpowers not to use them, and I think that takes away from the team if he’s not being his full authentic self.”
The coaches of the SMB Wolfpack faced a similar dilemma.
How, exactly, were they going to protect such a fierce competitor?
Suggs started at quarterback as a freshman. He could scramble for first downs, and he could throw the ball 50 yards in the air with a flick of his right arm. He also studied NFL All-Pro safeties Ed Reed, Brian Dawkins and Troy Polamalu. One of his second cousins is Terrell Suggs, a seven-time Pro Bowl linebacker who won a Super Bowl with the Ravens and another Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Suggs was so important to the Wolfpack that the coaches decided not to play him on defense as a freshman. In subsequent seasons, they usually waited until playoff games to deploy him in the defensive backfield.
The coaches could not limit Suggs completely, though. When the Wolfpack’s backup quarterback took snaps in practice, especially during one-on-one coverage drills, Suggs sometimes snuck into the line at cornerback or at wide receiver just because he enjoyed the competition so much.
“He was a guy that you’d have to hold back,” said Collin Quinn, who was the Wolfpack’s head coach during Suggs’ first three years of high school. “He loved being out there. He loved being out there with his buddies. He loved being a kid and competing, and loved getting better and practicing his craft. He wasn’t a reluctant football player. He was all-in.”
The SMB Wolfpack isn’t a typical high-school football squad. It’s a cooperative team comprising students from four Twin Cities private schools: St. Paul Academy and Summit School, The Blake School, Hope Academy and Minnehaha Academy. Suggs, who attended Minnehaha, wasn’t merely one of SMB’s best players; he was one of its best connectors, helping to unite kids from the different schools.
SMB won the Minnesota Class AAAA championship in 2018 during Suggs’ junior year and finished as the Class AAAA runner-up in 2019, losing 22-21 in overtime of a game in which Suggs sprained one of his knees just before halftime but played in the second half.
“He could beat you in so many ways,” said Chris Goodwin, who was SMB’s offensive coordinator in 2018 and its head coach in 2019. “He was a great passer. He could make plays. As a quarterback, he was so elusive. I’ve seen him break four or five tackles on a play or just elude four or five guys and then throw a touchdown pass. Some of his highlights, I’ve just never seen anything like in my life.”
For Suggs, choosing basketball over football was an excruciating decision.
His suitors in football included his home state Minnesota Golden Gophers and the Ohio State Buckeyes.
In an interview last week, Golden Gophers coach P.J. Fleck said that he and his staff spent four years recruiting Suggs. Fleck wanted Suggs to play quarterback at Minnesota, and Fleck said Suggs “absolutely” had enough talent to play in the NFL as a quarterback, wideout, cornerback or as a safety.
“Incredibly gracious, ultimate connector, elite competitor — that kind of sums up Jalen Suggs, in my opinion,” Fleck said.
“I’ll give you a basketball analogy because he plays basketball: He was the ultimate point guard on the football field,” Fleck added. “Incredible distributor, understood situational awareness, knew how to use his legs. (He was an) extender of plays, kept his eyes down the field, distributed the ball (to) who it needed to go to. He threw to the open guy — it sounds simple — and then made everybody else around him better.”
Suggs said he nearly chose to attend Minnesota. Instead, he picked Gonzaga, which does not have a varsity football program. He said people often assume that he chose to play basketball over football because of the more substantial risk of injury in football. He insists that was not a big consideration.
“I was always more worried about getting hurt on the basketball court than in football,” Suggs said. “I always thought I could protect myself a bit more, to initiate or avoid contact, a bit more on the football field. …
“I never really got hurt too much on the football field, to be honest. It was always the hardwood that messed me up. But yeah, that really wasn’t a factor. It was the timeline (and) accessibility to my main goal, which was generational wealth. I still love the game. I love them both.”
Suggs has accomplished his main goal. Drafted fifth in 2021 by the Magic, he earned approximately $30 million during the four years of his rookie-scale contract. He just completed the first season of a five-year contract worth $151 million.
He said he doesn’t regret his decision to choose basketball over football, but he acknowledges that football is never that far from his thoughts.
Even now, when he feels like he’s slipping on the defensive end and needs to concentrate further, he said he will watch football highlights of safeties intercepting passes or recovering fumbles or making bone-crunching hits. Those plays inspire him.
During the 2024 preseason, the Philadelphia 76ers sank a free throw with 0.6 seconds remaining in the second quarter. Suggs collected the basketball after it fell through the net and threw an inbounds pass to the edge of the restricted circle on the other end of the court, where Franz Wagner caught the ball and scored on a layup.
In a team film session a few days later, Magic assistant coaches and video coordinators spliced that long pass alongside footage from one of Suggs’ 25 career high-school touchdown passes. On that touchdown pass, Suggs threw the football 45 yards in the air and hit a wideout in stride at the goal line.
Different sports. Two equally perfect passes. What else would you expect from the first person in Minnesota history to be named the state’s Mr. Basketball and Mr. Football in the same year?
“Put the two clips side by side, it was exactly the same,” Magic assistant coach Bret Brielmaier said.
Suggs has admitted at various times over the last several years he misses football, but he’s always added that he made the right decision to choose basketball.
On Saturday, he enjoyed one of the best moments of his NBA career, the Magic’s thrilling 113-105 win over the Pistons in Game 3. He scored 15 points, grabbed three rebounds and dished out three assists that afternoon.
When the game ended, following Mosley’s postgame comments to the team, Suggs trudged in his flip-flops to the team’s therapy areas. He and many of his teammates spent time in a spacious cold plunge tub. Soaking in the 45-degree water reduces inflammation and diminishes muscle soreness, but it does not help much with the floor burns he often suffers from diving onto the court.
Fifty minutes after the final buzzer, he sat in his chair in the nearly empty Magic locker room, answering questions from reporters. A fluffy black towel around his neck obscured the scar on his upper left arm, but during his 33:18 of playing time, he had picked up a new scar, a small red abrasion straddling the top of his left cheekbone, underneath his eye.
He absorbed, and dished out, so much contact during the game that Suggs said he had “no idea” what caused the new mark on his face.
He had won big games before in both sports. A reporter asked him how the satisfaction of Saturday’s victory compared to how he felt after he won Minnesota state tournament football games.
Suggs let out a quick chuckle before he answered.
“This is the greatest feeling in the world,” he said. “That was amazing, but this is the highest level of competition, the greatest time of the year, with all eyes on these games. It’s when you can really earn respect from people around the league and all fans of basketball, because it’s the purest form of it. So football was fun. It was great wins. But nothing compared to playoff wins, playoff environments and getting it done.”
He spoke with such conviction that he sounded like he finally, and truly, made his peace with leaving football. After all, he still brings that same football intensity to every basketball game he plays. He is collecting new marks all over his body to prove it: bruises, cuts, floor burns.
Each one tells a different story.
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Josh Robbins is a senior writer for The Athletic. He began covering the Washington Wizards in 2021 after spending more than a decade on the Orlando Magic beat for The Athletic and the Orlando Sentinel, where he worked for 18 years. His work has been honored by the Football Writers Association of America, the Green Eyeshade Awards and the Florida Society of News Editors. He served as president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association from 2014 to 2023. Josh is a native of the greater Washington, D.C., area.
