Bucks training camp seems like it was a lifetime ago, Eric.
Remember when you and I were down in Southern California in mid-October, telling tales about how Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, Damian Lillard, Doc Rivers and the rest of them were feeling so bullish about bouncing back this season and becoming true title contenders?
Well, we’re three weeks into the regular season, and the Bucks’ 2-8 start has been so disastrous that the conversation has already turned to whether they can even make the playoffs. And, of course, there’s constant chatter about whether Antetokounmpo might want to relocate after this season if they don’t somehow turn this around.
These deer are in the headlights, all right. Not to mention the national spotlight.
The Bucks, remarkably, find themselves near the bottom of the NBA standings (only Toronto is worse at 2-9). They have as many losses three weeks into the season as they did in nearly nine weeks last season, and that start (24-8) wasn’t good enough to keep former coach Adrian Griffin from being fired and replaced by Rivers (when they were 30-13).
They’ve been playing without Khris Middleton, the 33-year-old, three-time All-Star who has yet to fully recover from offseason ankle surgeries. Now Antetokounmpo, who questioned the Bucks’ competitiveness after their 116-94 loss to the New York Knicks, is (understandably) losing his patience. There’s no way of overstating how awful this start has been.
So let’s try to figure out what it all means, and where it might be going, by starting with the on-court substance.
What do you see as the most pressing issues with this team?
Nehm: In my opinion, there are two main issues. Both are pretty simple.
Let’s start with the roster.
With the increasingly punitive rules for luxury tax teams, the Bucks had to make a decision on how they were going to proceed in the summer of 2023. After a first-round exit because of an upset to the No. 8 seed Miami Heat, the Bucks decided the change they needed was to let go of head coach Mike Budenholzer, who led them to the team’s first NBA championship in 50 seasons, and hire Griffin.
Both Middleton and Brook Lopez were free agents, so the Bucks also had to decide if they wanted to let one or both players walk as free agents without receiving any compensation in return or bring them back and deal with luxury tax consequences.
Ultimately, they re-signed Middleton to a three-year, $102 million contract with a third-year player option and Lopez to a two-year, $48 million contract. Both deals set up the Bucks to contend with a core four of Antetokounmpo, Middleton, Lopez and Jrue Holiday for at least the next two seasons.
Days before the season — and a month after Antetokounmpo publicly stated that the team needed to keep pushing as hard as possible to win another championship in an interview with The New York Times — Bucks general manager Jon Horst used the last bit of remaining draft capital in the team’s coffer to swap Holiday and starting shooting guard Grayson Allen for Damian Lillard, one of the NBA’s 75 greatest players of all-time.
This may all feel like ancient history after the turbulent last year in Milwaukee, but it’s necessary context that explains where the Bucks are today. The moves made in that summer locked the Bucks into attempting to contend with one of the highest luxury tax bills in the league through the 2024-25 season. The Bucks became a team that would rely on an older, top-heavy roster that leveraged its high-end talent to play elite offense and average to slightly-above-average defense.
Antetokounmpo and Lillard have been spectacular, but they don’t have one of the three players who make up the top-heavy portion of their roster, and that has led to a cascading number of problems.
- Without Middleton, their initial starting lineup has been positive (plus-4.2 points per 100 possessions) but not elite because of a middling defense and a good but not exceptional offense. Last season, lineups featuring all three members of the big three were plus 16.3 points per 100 possessions.
- Middleton’s absence has forced the Bucks to try to get a little bit more out of the big three’s supporting cast, and that has not gone well. Taurean Prince has knocked down an exceptional 55.9 percent from 3, but Lopez (27.7 percent), newcomer Gary Trent Jr. (23.1 percent) and Bobby Portis (26.7 percent) are all in the middle of career-worst shooting slumps.
- Rivers has staggered Antetokounmpo and Lillard to keep one of them on the floor at all times, but those single superstar lineups have not been successful. Lineups featuring Lillard and no Antetokounmpo have been outscored by 9.0 points per 100 possessions, while lineups featuring Antetokounmpo and no Lillard have been outscored by 6.1 points per 100 possessions.
The second problem for the Bucks is that they haven’t consistently played with the execution, focus and effort needed to consistently win NBA games. To start the season, that meant losses to the Brooklyn Nets and Chicago Bulls. When the Bucks went to Memphis, the Grizzlies ran them off the floor. And when they went to New York, the Knicks outhustled and outmuscled them for 48 minutes.
Combine those two things, and you have a team that is 20th in offensive rating, 22nd in defensive rating and just 2-8 through 10 games.
Amick: That context is definitely crucial here, though I’m not sure your loyal following of Bucks readers enjoyed that painful trip down memory lane. You’re right, though. Those macro decisions, which were so widely celebrated at the time, have now put them in the kind of nightmarish position that has quickly become a cautionary tale for other teams.
They are, in essence, officially stuck in second-apron hell.
As I wrote in this recent piece about Paul George and his LA Clippers exit, any team above the collective bargaining agreement’s second-apron luxury tax threshold ($189 million this season) better be sure the star players who put them there pan out. If they don’t, as the Bucks’ situation would seem to indicate at the moment, then the litany of roster restrictions that come with the second-apron life are such that teams have virtually no way to escape. You are no longer allowed to aggregate multiple player contracts to make trades, which means the front-office phone goes quiet in the kind of way that has to feel quite hopeless. One-for-one deals are still possible, but the scenarios to sift through that might help a team like Milwaukee survive here are far fewer than all of the non-second apron teams.
I could certainly see the Bucks doing some kind of deal, if not more than one, before the Feb. 6 deadline. But in terms of the big stuff that comes with their team’s calculus — Giannis, Dame, Doc and Khris — I don’t see anything changing. For those asking about whether Rivers could be on the hot seat, let’s not forget the Bucks paid him approximately $40 million on a three-and-a-half-year deal less than a year ago. What’s more, Horst is facing pressure because of how these past few seasons have gone, and league sources are skeptical he’d be given the leeway to make another coaching change this soon.
With that in mind, Eric, do you think any of this is fixable?
Nehm: I definitely think there is a path for them to climb out of this hole, but it will require them playing better than they have to this point.
First, their schedule is about to get a lot more favorable. The Bucks played six of their first 10 games on the road. Four of their first 10 games came against the Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics, the two elite teams in the Eastern Conference that have had no trouble establishing a rhythm to start the season.
Before facing off against the Celtics again on Dec. 6 in Boston, the Bucks will play 11 more games. Eight of those 11 will take place at Fiserv Forum. Nine of those 11 will be against fellow East teams under .500 entering Tuesday. The other two games are against the 5-5 Indiana Pacers and the 7-4 Houston Rockets. If the Bucks can take these games seriously — something they have not consistently shown the ability to do throughout this season — they have the opportunity to stack up wins.
Going something like 9-2 in these next 11 games would mean they could still be .500 even if they walked out of Boston on Dec. 6 with their third loss at the hands of the Celtics.
And while the Bucks have made the timeline on Middleton’s return to action as clear as mud over the last month, it’s still important to note this team was built to be top-heavy, and the Bucks are quite good with Middleton on the floor.
The Bucks outscored teams by 3.4 points per 100 possessions with Middleton last season. Since the 2016-17 season, Bucks lineups featuring Middleton have posted a positive net rating. Getting him back should help, even if he’s on a minutes limit to start.
Amick: First of all, it doesn’t hurt that the top-heavy East is so bad in this early going that Milwaukee is somehow just three games out of the third spot (Indiana holds it at 5-5 entering Tuesday). The rival Philadelphia 76ers, much like the Bucks, are quite pleased with this development.
What’s more, you have me convinced about the Middleton factor. If they can get him back sometime soon, and if he can be anywhere near the kind of All-Star-level player we’ve known him to be, then maybe they can find a way to salvage this season. Let’s not kid ourselves, though: Those are some major ifs.
With that in mind, I’ll leave you with this: What if this sort of play continues? Is anyone going to be in peril in season, or does it become a situation where it all gets resolved in the summer. We all know what the noise might look like at that time if that’s the case.
The Giannis talk around the league would be front and center, but questions about Lillard’s long-term wishes would be a focal point as well. Horst showed serious interest in the Detroit Pistons job last summer, only to be denied permission by the Bucks. So what does his future hold? There are rival executives who wonder if Rivers might wind up in the Bucks’ front office down the line. They can fix all of that messiness by winning, but that’s proving to be quite the challenging task.
Nehm: To me, so much of this is interconnected. The Bucks started this season with championship expectations, and no one is immune from those expectations. The simple fact for Milwaukee is that the Bucks need to start winning games. That was how this team was built, and that is what this organization expects. After they won the NBA championship in 2021, that became the expectation for the entire organization.
That has led to the difficult decisions the organization has made over the last few years. Championship expectations led to letting go of former head coach Mike Budenholzer when the Bucks lost to the Heat. Championship expectations led to Horst trading for Lillard. Championship expectations led to the team letting go of Griffin when the team did not perform to the level the organization expected.
If the team continues to underperform, ownership will be forced to analyze every piece of the organization to figure out what has gone wrong. But every part of the organization can avoid that by simply performing better in the next month and the rest of the season.
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(Top photo of Doc Rivers and Damian Lillard: Elsa / Getty Images)
