Giannis Antetokounmpo is a Buck until he says otherwise, and yet the dizzying speculation around his future in Milwaukee will continue until he puts a stop to it. So it goes when there is even a hint that one of the best players in the world might become available. Rival teams will plan and gather intel and draw their own conclusions about what Antetokounmpo might do, because they know what the Bucks know: that simply having Giannis on the roster changes a franchise on every level. They also know what the Bucks must: that Antetokounmpo’s professed goal—to win another title in Milwaukee—feels more distant today than it has in quite some time.
Seven years since Giannis and the Bucks first made the Eastern Conference finals, it's time to reimagine the roster. Milwaukee has held on to contention for so long that its stopgaps have stopgaps, and just about everything outside of Giannis is falling apart. Due to injury and contract timing, their roster has already been torn down to the studs. The draft coffers are full of cobwebs. There are no blue-chip prospects to bank on and little in the way of trade bait. And still, Antetokounmpo wants to lead the next great Bucks team. He wants to stay. Milwaukee just needs to give him a reason to.
Nine different Bucks logged time in the last game of their season, a one-point loss to the eventual Eastern Conference champs. Of those nine, only four are under contract to return: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kyle Kuzma, 25-year-old sharpshooter A.J. Green, and as of Sunday, Bobby Portis Jr. Everything else is still to be determined. Damian Lillard will miss most, if not all, of next season with a torn Achilles, and beyond that may never be the same player again. Longtime Buck Brook Lopez can test the market in free agency, as will more recent additions like Gary Trent Jr., Taurean Prince, and Ryan Rollins—budget signings who played their way into better offers. Even if the Bucks wanted to return the roster that won 48 games last season, they likely wouldn’t be able to.
This is an organization at a crossroads, caught between eras. The Bucks could scrap together the most immediately competitive team possible and fight like hell in an Eastern Conference with a power vacuum. Or they could take a more incremental (and in some ways dramatic) approach: to begin building a roster around Giannis that’s actually meant to last. The opening in the East isn't a call to make a doomed run at a conference the Bucks can't win. It's an allowance to keep competitive while taking the upcoming season as the pivot point it needs to be.
The full midlevel exception ($14.1 million) is a good place to start. Due to its perpetually strained cap situation, Milwaukee hasn’t had much actual spending power during the Giannis era. The team’s biggest free agent signings during those 12 years have been Greg Monroe, Matthew Dellavedova, D.J. Augustin, and Ersan Ilyasova. There’s no big-game hunting to be done this summer, but even having the full midlevel is a novelty for the Bucks. This summer presents a rare opportunity for Milwaukee to outbid the market for a potential starter—or to break up that exception among a few useful role players. That MLE figure was enough last summer to land a player like Aaron Wiggins, De'Anthony Melton, Derrick Jones Jr., or Naji Marshall, with room to spare.
The problem is the pitch. Every team is desperate for affordable supporting talent this summer, and many of those clubs are in less precarious positions than Milwaukee. You can already see a catch-22 developing: coveted free agents might not want to sign with the Bucks because they can’t be sure Giannis will stick around, while Giannis has less reason to stick around if Milwaukee can’t fill out a team around him. For years, the Bucks have been able to sell veterans on high-level basketball and championship contention. The latter, at minimum, is gone. And would a quality vet turn down a chance to play for the Knicks, Nuggets, Cavs, or Lakers if it felt like the bottom could give out in Milwaukee at any time?
The Bucks’ barren depth chart does provide a certain kind of opportunity for the right free agent. Playing off of Giannis is a good way for a talented player to produce and secure their next deal, as Trent, Prince, and Kevin Porter Jr. can attest. It just takes a leap of faith—not just that Antetokounmpo will start the season in Milwaukee, but that a superstar as driven and competitive as Giannis will be able to make his peace with a roster that’s nowhere near a title. For Milwaukee, a successful offseason might involve splitting the midlevel between the 26-year-old Trent and a bridge guard like Dennis Schröder, while luring a stretch big like Guerschon Yabusele or Jake LaRavia. This isn’t the endgame. It’s just about building back a competitive rotation, piece by piece.
Striking a new deal with Portis is a bit of a saving grace, in that it spares Milwaukee from needing to rework its entire frontcourt rotation. Portis is a flawed, imperfect player, but he’s undeniably productive and gives Antetokounmpo a crucial safety net. It’s always tempting to just pencil in Giannis at the 5; a team with Giannis doesn’t need a true center, just like it doesn’t necessarily need a traditional point guard. His versatility opens up the Bucks to all sorts of provisional options. Still, the end of last season (and Lillard’s absence, in particular) made clear that just because Antetokounmpo can do some of everything doesn’t change the fact that he needs relief, too. The fact that Portis can carry 25 to 30 minutes between the 4 and the 5 is valuable, and the fact that re-signing him doesn’t get in the way of Milwaukee’s plans for the midlevel exception makes him especially so.
The goals of next season should be to add lasting, rotation-level talent and round out the roster enough to avoid running Giannis into the ground. The trick—especially for a veteran-favoring coach like Doc Rivers—is to balance the latter without impeding the former. Even with Portis, there will be a reasonable argument for Milwaukee to re-sign Lopez into a reserve role or bring back Jericho Sims. Yet the more the Bucks resemble the team that just got bounced from the playoffs in roster and rotation, the more they risk falling into a similar malaise.
Making Giannis a career Buck demands reinvention. It requires Rivers to expand his horizons, both in who he’s willing to make space for in the lineup and what shape that lineup takes. This is a chance to skew younger—to lean into the fact that Dame’s injury lowers expectations. The Bucks have backdoored their way into a kind of clarity due to the fact that they don’t have control of any of their own first-round picks until 2031. There is nothing to do but compete. They have to keep moving forward. To do that, the Bucks need to add and actually develop talent.
Milwaukee has to give Kuzma the chance to rebound into a useful Buck or a more attractive trade candidate. It has to tick a season off of Lillard’s contract, to make moving him—cold as that would be—a more realistic possibility on an expiring deal. Another year brings another distant draft pick that can be traded. It means one more card to play, one more possibility. The Bucks can’t afford to sideline prospects like Green, Andre Jackson Jr., and Tyler Smith any longer. A season of growth starts with cultivating trust.
There are no shortcuts left. The single worst outcome for this season would be for Giannis to look around come January and see hard limits everywhere around him. Declining teammates. An inflexible style. A ceiling of Milwaukee’s own making. The Bucks won’t be able to build a championship roster this season, but that doesn’t mean they can’t find hope.
It’s hard to take the risks required when it feels like there’s so much at stake, but change is here whether the Bucks welcome it or not. Roster-wide turnover is an opportunity to embrace a new era, and it comes at a time when the East is particularly accommodating to striving, imperfect teams. Bold, forward-looking management and a few lucky breaks could keep the Bucks in the mix. Milwaukee has been a winning team for nine consecutive seasons, the second-longest active streak in the league. That’s the Giannis Effect. Give him something to work with and he’ll make the Bucks a winner again. Show him proof of concept and he might just see the future.
