Pressure on Bucks as Giannis supermax looms

Tying Giannis Antetokounmpo down to a four-year contract which has turned out to be a bargain was a masterstroke by the Milwaukee Bucks back in 2016, but their NBA title window is now closing quickly. Sky Sports NBA analyst Mark Deeks explains why…

You could argue that the Milwaukee Bucks’ championship window opened when they drafted Giannis Antetokounmpo in 2013. Everything that has followed since then only exists because that move happened.

More practically, though, the window opened last year. It began when they hired Mike Budenholzer to be the new head coach of the team, and it fully opened when, in the subsequent free agent window, they were able to snag the somewhat-pioneering Brook Lopez on a one-year, $3.382m contract.

It seems silly to say that any team only became a contender when they were able to sign a particular veteran so cheaply. After all, the same summer, Milwaukee gave Ersan Ilyasova six times that amount. But the arrival of Lopez was concurrent with the much-changed philosophies brought in by Budenholzer saw the Bucks maximise the other talents on the roster they already had, Giannis in particular, and go from a middle-of-the-pack low playoff seed to having the best record in the NBA in just one season.

The fact that the Bucks could not overcome the stifling defence of the Toronto Raptors in the 2018 Eastern Conference Finals should not be taken too heavily. It is not an indictment of the legitimacy of their team as constructed that they were unable to best a juggernaut of a defensive unit that ended up ultimately winning an entirely deserved NBA championship. This Bucks team will be a contender again this season, or should be, barring significant injury or another otherwise unforeseeable disaster.

For the most part, Milwaukee will bring back the same team as last year. In our look at the Denver Nuggets earlier in the week, we explored the value of continuity in an era of enhanced player movement and in a subsequent look at the Golden State Warriors, we saw how difficult it can be to keep the band together in that same era when enough important free agencies dovetail together.

Milwaukee wound up somewhere between the two. Of their seven leading minute recipients in the Eastern Conference Finals, five were free agents this summer, and a sixth (Eric Bledsoe) would have been were it not for an unexpected mid-season extension. The important bit is that Milwaukee were able to bring three of their key free agents back.

The two that left – Nikola Mirotic and Malcolm Brogdon – were no small departures. This is particularly true of Brogdon, a player who Milwaukee had grown over the previous three years to be an excellent all-around combo guard, an amazingly efficient player who particularly thrived in the Budenholzer era considering his excellent shooting, discipline, defensive flexibility and high IQ on both ends of the court. His departure was however inevitable – or at least, if not his, then someone’s was.

Having been able to sign Antetokounmpo to a four-year, $100m extension in 2016 that was below the maximum he could have received, one that has aged even more favourably in the years since due to the subsequent salary cap explosion, Milwaukee have been in the privileged position of having one of the game’s great players at a bargain price.

This has allowed them to bring in expensive but quality ancillary pieces like Mirotic to make short-term pushes for playoff success. It has also allowed them to get away with some mistakes in their roster building, in particular a long-standing tendency to overpay bench contributors (Tony Snell, Mirza Teletovic, Matthew Dellavedova, John Henson and maybe even Ilyasova spring to mind).

It is the good fortune or foresight of the Giannis contract that has allowed them to aggressively try to keep things together this summer. Certainly, they lost Brogdon, a significant loss. But the Giannis bargain allowed them to re-sign Khris Middleton to a substantial five-year, $177.5m deal, be able to bring back Lopez on an increased salary (four years and $52m but still excellently good value, find a little bit of money for George Hill (two years and $20m) and also sign the Bledsoe extension in the first place.

Maybe the money that Bledsoe got would have been better served being allocated to Brogdon. Maybe the fact that Bledsoe was able to receive such a big extension, whereas Brogdon would have had to go to free agency and be re-signed, was the tipping point in why he got the money instead in a summer when the team had so many other questions to answer.

Either way, as above, the Bucks have been able to spend to stay competitive at a time when the Raptors have lost Kawhi Leonard and thus the defence that made them champions. The Eastern Conference is open again, and Milwaukee are still in business.

There is, however, an element of urgency about this competitive window now. The Giannis bargain ends in two years’ time, and, whether they can