No cliché in the English language is as misunderstood as “rock bottom.”
It is a historical phrase, not intended for present-tense use — applied retroactively to the lowest moment of a timeline that has already reached its conclusion. But when struggling through the doldrums of being alive, we may naively believe that, because things are so bad right now, they can only get better. We may think we have hit “rock bottom,” and that our situation must improve because there is no lower point imaginable. But we are wrong.
It can always get worse.
For example: The Milwaukee Bucks may be tempted to believe that, because their season has begun so poorly, they are at “rock bottom.” But, despite being just 4-8, they are not. They are nowhere near the jagged gravel that is waiting for them at the end of this impossibly deep hole they are free-falling down. To mix my metaphors, this isn’t the earthquake — this is the foreshock, and the ensuing disaster may be so dire I’m going to suggest the Bucks do something I once literally swore I would never advocate for:
They need to trade their best player, Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Before delving further into the horrifying specifics of the sinkhole Milwaukee is careening down, I must acknowledge several potential conflicts of interest. I am from Boston, and while it may seem advantageous for me to pray for the relocation of by far the Celtics’ strongest adversary, it actually makes me uniquely qualified to comment. Hear me out.
I know what it’s like to have a city legend — not just “best player” — traded away. Mookie Betts was beloved in Boston. He was an icon, and dealing him to the Dodgers for what became literally just Connor Wong (no offense to Wong, but come on) was an all-time sports trauma moment for me. I don’t advocate for teams to trade local legends lightly.
And it doesn’t matter what I want anyway, because the Bucks don’t seem to think things are anywhere near bad enough to warrant trading the best player they’ve had since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, crown prince of being plugged into the league, said as much on Wednesday’s episode of The Hoop Collective.
“Right now, the Bucks have made it clear they’re not doing anything with Giannis, and Giannis hasn’t said anything.” Windhorst said. “So right now, I think it’s all speculation and conjecture.”
Perhaps that’s because the Bucks think they’ve hit rock bottom and can only get better. Patience and time, they must think. But there’s a reason Windhorst said it was only speculative “right now.” He may have meant that the Bucks don’t intend to make a massive overhaul in roster direction midseason, but he also may just be well aware that when these wheels on something like this start to move, they move fast. Faster than the Bucks might be ready for.
Several advanced metrics show that the Bucks may not be this bad — they are middle of the pack in both offensive and defensive rating, and through 12 games, they have the third-biggest discrepancy between expected winning % (.434) and actual winning % (.333).
Antetokounmpo himself is actually having a solid statistical start to the year. And for Giannis, “solid” means world-destroying. He scored 59 points to claw out a win against the Pistons Wednesday night — and is averaging 33 points per game with 12 rebounds and 5 assists — but his team did everything they could to sabotage their own chances against Detroit.
Giannis can still win a game by himself, but this team just doesn’t have the firepower to seriously contend alongside him.
Even the most optimistic stats point to, at best, middling projections for this year’s Bucks. Their projected winning % sits at .418, which is a crisp 34 wins. That’s not enough. Not even in the mostly woeful Eastern Conference. In fact, nothing about this season has been enough for their purposes. This team does not get enough stops. It does not score enough points. It does not win enough games.
As presently constructed, the Bucks cannot beat the Knicks. They cannot beat the Celtics. They cannot beat the Cavaliers. Through 11 games, they’ve lost to these three contenders a combined five times. Not even an eventual playoff return of Khris Middleton — which, given his history, is no guarantee — suggests they would fare any better in a postseason series, and that is with Damian Lillard and Antetokounmpo perfectly healthy.
That is where things are in Milwaukee. The team has roughly the same statistical profile as the Chicago Bulls, a team teetering on the knife’s edge of the Play-In or Lottery. But the Bulls have their picks and muted expectations. Glorious flexibility in the face of abject mediocrity.
The Bucks, on the other hand, control no first round picks until 2031. That’s almost two presidential terms away.
And with how much they’ve invested, this team cannot afford to be this mediocre. The Ringer’s Zach Kram produced the aptly named “NBA All In-Dex” to show how pot-committed each team really is to their current roster. The Bucks came in sixth, but with the third most-decimated draft assets to go with a reasonable financial situation score. Lillard and Khris Middleton, who make up a large chunk of their future payroll, both have a player options in the next two years and could both hit the open market sooner rather than later. But reasonable still may be a dubious distinction, with small-market Milwaukee shouldering the fourth-highest payroll in the league for a below .500 team.
Where Kram sees these expiring deals as better financial flexibility than the Celtics or Suns, I see it as further evidence of how screwed the Bucks actually are. Lillard and Middleton are their second and third most valuable assets, and they could just lose them both for nothing as soon as 2027. They have (basically) no picks, no valuable young players, and are essentially piecing together a hodgepodge rotation around stars who are supposed to be good together but so far just… aren’t.
Ironically, this is the higher-stakes version of the Portland Trail Blazers right before Lillard was traded. The team was not going to win anything, and Lillard was never going to be more valuable. That trade needed to command such a return that it would define the Trail Blazers’ next decade, or it was all for naught. But if Lillard was an explosive trade asset, Antetokounmpo is thermonuclear.
We are talking about one of the best players in basketball and potentially of all time here. He doesn’t turn 30 until next month, and still possesses a combination of speed, angular finesse and pure destructive force that only prime LeBron James could match. And he’s taller than LeBron. When Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving asked out of Brooklyn two years ago, it was a big deal. This is an entire level above that.
Antetokounmpo would command the largest package of assets in NBA history, and perhaps in the history of sports. We have to remember that Mikal Bridges was recently traded for what was essentially six first round picks, and Durant required five, plus Bridges (who, again, is apparently worth six) and Cameron Johnson (worth at least one himself).
But Antetokounmpo would break all this math, and demand some new kind of metaphysical framework for a trade.
The only teams with the concepts of a plan to acquire him would be the Houston Rockets or the Brooklyn Nets. They have the young players, expiring contracts, and asset profiles to at least construct some sort of plausible offer. Antetokounmpo would conceivably have some say as to where he’d like to go, but the Bucks would demand both elite (not just good) young players and more draft picks than the world previously felt possible. The Nets may lack the former, so I think the Rockets may be the only option. Except…
…okay, there is one other option… so horrifying that I actually refuse to acknowledge it: What if the Thunder cobbled together the salary along with their (nearly) endless supply of first-round picks to furnish the Bucks with eight firsts for Giannis?
This trade may open up a black hole. It may shatter the fabric of reality. It may cause mass, unexplainable livestock death across the American Great Planes. Should Antetokounmpo actually be the result of the Thunder’s decade-sized asset stockpile, I would have to take a week off of work to walk in circles around my neighborhood, wondering how… and why?
Silver linings are everything. The Bucks won a championship with Antetokounmpo by going all-in with Jrue Holiday. No one will ever take that away from them. But they have tried and failed to restructure the decaying roster by going all-in again with Damian Lillard, and now have one historically valuable asset left to avoid falling into obscurity for the next decade.
Some might say they should just trade Lillard and keep Antetokounmpo, but the former’s value has only depreciated since they got him last September, and is not enough to recoup the losses they’ve incurred over the years on his own. You don’t get a mulligan on going all-in. Unless you go all out.
They also may not have a choice sooner rather than later. Antetokounmpo may be publicly amiable right now, but any superduperstar on a bad team is a ticking time bomb to ask out. Durant proved you could force a trade with any contract, and the Bucks may find out how rough off that can leave you if they don’t get ahead of it.
This sucks. I understand that this sucks. But they may not have a choice in the end, and I am reminded of anonymous advice given to the head of the French Directory, Paul Barras, about what to do with this talented but probably-too-ambitious Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte: “Promote this man, or he will promote himself without you.”
In the end, the wheels of history turned such that Bonaparte promoted himself without his presumed superiors, and Antetokounmpo may just do the same to the Bucks if they don’t see the writing on the wall themselves. This isn’t just going to get better, and may very well get worse. Antetokounmpo could get injured, ask out himself, or simply refuse to play a la 2019 Anthony Davis. And it’s not like Antetokounmpo “would never” do this. He has already flirted with leaving twice to force the Bucks to move all their chips for Holiday and Lillard. Who’s to say he won’t do it for real?
At the end of the day, the Bucks are being offered a binary choice: trade Antetokounmpo now for the largest package of assets in the observable universe, or lose him somewhere down the road for less if he forces their hand and they run out of leverage. Worst comes to worst, he may just walk for nothing.
The Bucks have a chance to get ahead of all that. They need to learn from the Brooklyn Nets’ five-year embarrassment. Brooklyn went all-in twice, bailed too late and were left with a gutted roster, forced to trade for their own picks back in order to properly tank. The 2021 Championship makes this all less embarrassing for Milwaukee, but does not change the logical reality that it’s time to jumpstart the rebuild that is coming for them, whether they like it or not.
The Bucks think they’ve seen rock bottom, but they ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s time to take the last exit off the highway to hell.
