In professional sport there is nothing as tantalising, and blinding, as talented youth, and few teams in the NBA have as much young potential as the Milwaukee Bucks.
That potential started to become reality last year, with the Bucks improving by 26 wins from the season before, making the playoffs as a sixth seed and giving the veteran Bulls all they could handle before losing 4-2.
With a young, improving core, and the offseason additions of Greg Monroe and Greivis Vasquez, logic dictated that the Bucks would be even better this year.
Over a third of the way into their season, Milwaukee has been a trainwreck. The Bucks are 10-18, which flatters them given that they have the point differential of a team that should be 7-21. By adjusted net rating, only Philadelphia and the Lakers have been worse this season.
The offence has been stuck in mud, ranking 25th in the league, while the defence – the purported strength of the team – has fallen off a cliff from fourth in the league last season to 28th this season. In terms of raw potential, the Bucks are still in the upper half of the league. But in terms of reality, which is the metric they unfortunately have to be judged by, they’re one of the five worst teams in the NBA right now.
On some nights, the light of talent becomes so blinding that you can trick yourself into believing that this roster construction can work. The Bucks have beaten the Cavs and Warriors this season, and there are games like the Warriors’ lone defeat where everything clicks.
Greg Monroe will look like Karl Malone in the post and everything in the nether region between the rim and the mid-range catches the bottom of the net as though it was always meant to. The nuclear athleticism of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jabari Parker overwhelms opponents, Michael Carter-Williams slithers through defences to the rim and dishes clever passes, and a wild card like OJ Mayo gets just hot enough to provide a semblance of spacing.
But it’s an unsustainable mirage. Because on most nights, like when they lose by 18 to the Lakers or 24 to the Magic, the Bucks are a mess. They have less spacing than Ryan Reynolds in ‘Buried’ and their youth manifests itself in the ways that youth so often does – with turnovers, defensive laziness, and a lack of composure.
Expectations were high for the Bucks this season. Vegas set their over-under at 44.5 wins, anticipating a leap from last year. On the surface, the reasoning was sound – talented young players improve quickly, and Milwaukee is loaded with talented young players. But look a little deeper, and they were set up to fail this year.
The Bucks team that ended last season wasn’t very good in the first place. After trading Brandon Knight for Michael Carter-Williams the Bucks went 11-18 with the league’s fourth-worst offence. The Bucks added the shiny new pieces of Monroe, Vasquez and a healthy Parker, but lost the shooting of Ersan Ilyasova and the glue of Zaza Pachulia and Jared Dudley, the team’s two veteran presences and savviest defenders.
For all the uproar of Philadelphia not having any veteran leaders, who are the bastions of gravitas and experience on Milwaukee? Jerryd Bayless and Mayo?
The absence of their three veterans from last season his killed Milwaukee. The Bucks had the best defence in the league last season with Pachulia on the floor as well as the 13th best offence. With him on the bench, those rankings tumbled to tenth and 29th.
Ilyasova and Dudley aren’t glamorous, but their ability to provide shooting from the four gave Milwaukee the precious space that allowed their offence to breathe. Without them, the Bucks offence has choked to death.
The big-picture Milwaukee blueprint is easy to see, and not without merit. In a league obsessed with switching on defence, the Bucks want to be a lengthy, athletic defensive monster with the versatility to switch every position on the floor – like the Warriors. They want to wreak havoc and generate turnovers with their long limbs and then allow their athleticism to devastate teams in transition.
The big picture makes sense, but it was smaller-picture players like Pachulia, Ilyasova and Dudley that rounded the edges and allowed the vision to take place. Without them, the Bucks have become a popcorn blockbuster with no plot and no leading man singularly powerful enough to paper over the cracks.
Going forward, the Milwaukee core is the line-up they started against Golden State on Friday: MCW, Khris Middleton, Giannis, Parker and Monroe. The problem is, as coach Jason Kidd conceded, that line-up is unplayable in the modern NBA.
Middleton is the only player of the five who can shoot, and line-ups with four non-threats from deep are a suicide mission, a journey up Everest in shorts and thongs. Play those five guys together and you die, which is what Milwaukee has been doing – that core line-up is minus 8.0 points per 100 possessions, a mark eclipsed only by the Lakers and Sixers, the league’s scholars in ineptitude.
There’s cause to believe that line-up, and those players, will get better. Giannis shot 35 per cent on threes from 118 attempts in his rookie year. Parker hit 36 per cent of his threes at Duke from 106 attempts. Neither of these guys have Kyle Korver’s stroke, but they’re not Rajon Rondo either.
The issue is that Carter-Williams might be Rondo. MCW has made seven shots all season from beyond 19 feet. He’s shooting 26.8 per cent from mid-range and is only an average finisher at the rim. In Stephen Curry’s league, it’s unclear whether this guy can exist.
Carter-Williams symbolises the broader problem with Milwaukee – they’ve taken chances on roster construction and appear, at an admittedly early stage, to have lost. Giannis and Jabari are potentially transformative players, dynamic talents who could be the foundation for a contender. Middleton is the ultimate glue guy, a capable defender who, even in a down year, is shooting 43 per cent from three. With Middleton on the court this season the Bucks are an insane 10 points per 100 possessions better on offence – the difference between Atlanta and Philadelphia – demonstrating the value of his shooting.
In the middle of last season, Milwaukee had four chess pieces – Giannis, Jabari, Middleton and Brandon Knight. They chose to trade Knight for MCW, in the hope that they were upgrading to a rook. It seems like they might have a pawn on their hands.
In a vacuum, getting Greg Monroe was a smart move, on a great-value contract. But the centre who can’t shoot or protect the rim is an NBA dinosaur. Monroe has been everything the Bucks could have asked for this year, putting up a 16-10 with exquisite touch at the rim. He’s also averaging less than a block a game and manning the middle for the league’s third-worst defence. Although Monroe is unquestionably a superior player, it’s tempting to wonder whether the Bucks would have been better off paying someone like Kosta Koufos (or just keeping Pachulia) for better line-up balance.
In MCW and Monroe, the Bucks’ two big splashes don’t look like paying off. Their smaller splashes have been even worse, with ripple effects still to come. Trading a 2017 first-round pick and 2015 second rounder for one year of Greivis Vasquez was a debacle. Vasquez, a poor man’s Jose Calderon, will be a free agent after this season. The fact that he just suffered an ankle injury that rules him out for four months feels particularly cruel and apt – as though the basketball gods are punishing Milwaukee for such a myopic trade.
The Bucks also traded away Pachulia, Dudley and Ilyasova for the basketball equivalent of a decaying fruit basket and some movie vouchers. All three are currently starting for teams contending for the playoffs.
All is not lost for Milwaukee. They’re still in the best place they’ve been since the early 2000s, when they made a run to game seven of the conference finals with that now-forgotten Ray Allen, Glenn Robinson and Sam Cassell team that was thwarted by Allen Iverson. The vague, crushed hopes they pinned at various times on Michael Redd, Andrew Bogut, Brandon Jennings, Monta Ellis and Larry Sanders (remember him?) have dissipated into nothingness. The infamous 15-67 2013-14 season that saw the Bucks start Nate Wolters, Ekpe Udoh and something called Miroslav Raduljica at different stages is a distant memory, a precursor to hope.
And hope the Bucks do have. Giannis, Jabari and Middleton is a meaningful core. Monroe has real trade value and John Henson is a legitimate piece as a back-up big man. MCW isn’t a lost cause, although he’s already 24, a year older than Kyrie Irving, and better start finding something soon.
It’s not time to panic yet. Giannis turned 21 a fortnight ago and is four years younger than Draymond Green. Jabari is 20 and has played less than 50 NBA games. If these two continue to develop – and there’s every reason to believe that they will – the Bucks should be a contender in the coming years.
But growth is never assured, and often context dependent, and Milwaukee has done its best to set a fire to context over the past 12 months. They have to hope that talent is enough to quell the flames.
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