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What happened to the Milwaukee Bucks? – The Mercury News



Warriors beat writer Danny Emerman shares his thoughts on the NBA

The results are in, and the pollsters were all wrong: The Milwaukee Bucks are on the verge of absolute catastrophe.

Expected to be a title contender, the Bucks have started 2-7 and have no lifeboats. Their only wins are against a depleted 76ers and the tanking Jazz. The lowly Nets and Bulls have handed them Ls. And true contenders have easily discarded them.

Giannis & Co. rank 20th in offensive rating and 22nd in defensive rating.

Not even the most pessimistic prognosticators could have predicted this. Not even with the warning signs from last year — a 17-19 record under Doc Rivers and a subpar season from Damian Lillard.

Any team with Giannis Antetokounmpo presumably would be at least competitive. He’s inarguably one of the five best players in the league. A two-time MVP still in his prime, Antetokounmpo should be good enough to power any team to a winning record.

And he’s playing awesome, one of three players averaging at least 30 points. So is Lillard, who looks more aggressive than last season and is slashing 27/7/5.

That’s how bleak it is: Even with two stars performing at elite levels, the team is still drowning.

Khris Middleton remains sidelined, and he won’t be the savior whenever he returns. Brook Lopez, 36, is no longer a Defensive Player of the Year candidate.

The Bucks have six players in their rotation averaging eight points per game or less who play actual rotation minutes. In their most recent game, a blowout loss to the Knicks, Warriors castoff Ryan Rollins played 12 minutes.

Milwaukee fired Adrian Griffin last year when he led the team to a 30-13 record. Since then, the Bucks are 21-30 including their first-round exit. Their roster is old and has no clear avenues to improve.

How’d the Bucks, who won the 2021 title, get here? Well, they made the type of trade most front offices in their position would have made — the type of trade the Warriors have sought and their fans continue to clamor for.

After getting bounced from the 2023 playoffs, Milwaukee traded Jrue Holiday, Grayson Allen a future first-round pick and two future swaps for Lillard. It was the superstar upgrade they thought they needed, the home-run swing that would put them back on top. Lillard, though, compromised the Bucks’ defense while hurting the team’s ability to add depth because of his $54 million salary. Having two players (Lillard and Antetokounmpo) on max deals makes adding valuable role players extremely challenging, and the Bucks haven’t been able to hit in the draft to backfill minutes.

You know who’d love to have the kind of depth the Warriors have assembled? The Bucks.

Pushing your eggs into the superstar basket is often the fastest way to contention. But it needs to be the right superstar. If it’s not, a blockbuster trade can be the fastest way to purgatory — and wasting, instead of maximizing, a generational player’s prime.



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