Bucks Must Go All In for Giannis or Bite the Bullet and Trade Him

No man’s land is the worst place to be— especially when you have a once-in-a-generation superstar.

Unfortunately, it’s precisely where the Milwaukee Bucks find themselves a quarter into the season.

It’s a roster too flawed to compete for a championship, or perhaps even playoff home-court advantage. But it’s a roster that was just good enough to give Bucks Nation (and Giannis) a false sense of hope.

That hope, or what’s left of it, seemed to die Monday night.

Not Good Enough

The Bucks have now lost eight of their last nine games, placing them squarely out of the play-in at the No. 11 seed.

Sure, most of those losses came without Giannis. But last night was different.

Last night, a near-fully healthy Bucks squad (except Taurean Prince) lost to the league’s worst team. To make matters worse, the 2-16 Wizards were without their best player, Alex Sarr, and two key rotation players in Corey Kispert and Tre Johnson.

To add even more insult to injury, it was none other than Bucks’ legend Khris Middleton who iced the game down the stretch with a clutch three-point play and three-pointer just a few possessions later.

Yes, it was just one game— a bad loss to a glorified G League team. But the loss was a microcosm of the nagging flaws facing Milwaukee: dumb turnovers, poor defensive rotations, and bad coaching.

To go 21-38 (55.3%) from behind the arc and lose to a team with a -14.2 average point differential takes an extraordinary combination of turnovers, defensive lapses, rebounding failures, and a lack of in-game adjustments.

We can talk about Myles Turner grabbing just three rebounds against a backup center. We can speak of Kyle Kuzma and Bobby Portis missing their rotations and being out of position. But the truth is, there’s no individual (player or coach) who bears sole responsibility for the Bucks’ struggles. The roster just isn’t good enough.

What does “All-In” Look Like?

Giannis isn’t going to hang around forever.

Despite his uncompromising loyalty thus far in his Bucks career, Giannis is a competitor at the end of the day. In a recent interview regarding the Bucks’ seven-game losing streak, Giannis stated, “I want to win. We’ve lost 7 in a row. I don’t remember the last time I’ve lost 7 in a row”.

It was 2014, Giannis’ rookie season.

During the summer, after making a series of moves that purportedly made the Bucks more competitive, Jon Horst said, “I’ve done everything within my humanly possible power this offseason” to make the Bucks a competitive basketball team.

That’s just patently false.

The Bucks have two tradeable first-round picks. They also have $36 million in combined salaries for Bobby Portis and Kyle Kuzma.

While I’ll spare you the dozens of trade machine simulations we’ve run over the last few weeks, here’s a list of players the Bucks could make reasonable offers for with some combination of salary (Bobby+Kuz+vet minimum) and picks:

• Zach LaVine

• Ja Morant

• LaMelo Ball

• Zion Williamson

• Brandon Ingram

• Jerami Grant

• Andrew Wiggins

• Jonathan Kuminga

• Trey Murphy III

• Herb Jones

Not all of these guys are needle movers, or even good fits on the current roster. The purpose of this list is to illustrate that Horst, while making some incredible moves in the offseason, did nowhere near everything “humanly possible” to elevate this roster.

To go all in would mean mortgaging the team’s future (including our tradeable first-round picks) to give Giannis a sliver of a chance at competing for another Championship. In actuality, there is probably not a trade out there that can raise this team’s ceiling to true contention. But there are moves to be made — that MUST be made — to avoid Giannis’ departure from Milwaukee.

Bite the Bullet or Go All In?

Jon Horst has arrived at another crossroad, one more desperate than ever before.

Do you exhaust all possible resources and assets to give the roster a fighting chance in the playoffs, or do you call it quits and do the unthinkable: trade Giannis?

On the bright side, the Eastern Conference is wide open. The top-seeded Pistons are fantastic, but extremely young. Detroit hasn’t won a playoff series since 2008, and only two players in their rotation have ever won a playoff series. The Celtics are Tatum-less, the Pacers are tanking, and the Cavs have had their own set of struggles.

A healthy Giannis with a formidable roster (Rollins, KPJ, Turner, and say, Trey Murphy III) could be just enough to take any team to seven games. The caveat here is adding a wing like Murphy, who can hit from downtown at a high volume while defending multiple positions.

It doesn’t need to be Murphy— there are several other guys that fit the description above. One thing is for certain, though. If the Bucks are serious about keeping Giannis for the long haul, a big move needs to happen, and it needs to happen soon.

Option B is the unthinkable. I’ll spare you the nightmares of imagining Giannis anywhere outside of Milwaukee (lord knows the national media has done that enough), but that nightmare is knocking at the doorstep of the Bucks’ front office.

The worst thing Horst can do is nothing at all. Indecision is a decision, one that paves the road to basketball hell. You cannot continue to test Giannis’ loyalty with a roster simply unfit for serious contention.

Horst and the rest of Milwaukee’s front office have to commit. Give Giannis and this Bucks team one more fighting chance, or bite the bullet on a Giannis trade.

Basketball purgatory is not an option when you have Giannis Antetokounmpo on your team.

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