Bucks Face a Sobering Reality After Giannis Trade: Milwaukee Will Be Bad for a Long Time
The Milwaukee Bucks did the unthinkable Monday night and traded Giannis Antetokounmpo to the Miami Heat. Now comes the part nobody in Wisconsin wants to admit out loud. This franchise is going to be bad. For a long time.
Look at what is left. Tyler Herro is the headline name back, and he is a useful 26-year-old All-Star guard. Kel’el Ware has promise. Jaime Jaquez Jr. is a rotation piece. Kasparas Jakucionis was just drafted. The Bucks added three first-round picks and a swap to the war chest.
That is a fine return for a player on a roster that won 32 games. It is not the return that produces another title in the next five years.
The Antetokounmpo era in Milwaukee ended with one championship in 2021 and a slow slide ever since. The Bucks won exactly one playoff series after the title run. They burned through coaches. They made the Damian Lillard trade, watched it fall apart, and then made the math worse with every subsequent move. By the end, Antetokounmpo himself was demanding the team explain why he was being held out of games to protect his trade value.
That is the part most fans skip when they grade the trade. The Bucks were not selling high. They were selling whenever they could because Antetokounmpo was done waiting for the front office to fix it.
Herro will help. He averaged 26 points last season and is a legitimate scoring guard. He also plays no defense, has never been the best player on a contender, and is now the centerpiece of a team that needs everything. That is a heavy backpack.
The franchise has assets, but the asset profile is wrong for a team that wants to compete soon. Three first-round picks from a Heat team that just acquired Antetokounmpo are not going to be high picks. The Bucks are not getting top-five selections from a Miami team that just added one of the four best players on the planet. Those picks land in the 20s, where rotation help comes from, not stars.
The math is brutal. The Bucks need to acquire star talent, and the only way to do that without high picks is either to nail every single development decision on the young pieces they got back or use Herro as the chip in another trade.
That is the other reality. Herro is more valuable as a trade asset to a contender than as the focal point of a rebuilding team. The Bucks already know this. NBA insider Brian Windhorst said the plan is to keep Herro, but the Pistons have already called, and other contenders will too.
The front office has to decide what this rebuild actually is. If it is the slow kind, where you collect picks and let young players develop, then Herro probably gets moved by the deadline. If it is the fast kind, where you try to make the play-in and prove you can win without Antetokounmpo, then Herro is the centerpiece for two years.
Either way, Milwaukee fans need to recalibrate. There is no quick fix coming. The Antetokounmpo era brought a championship and a decade of relevance. What comes next is going to be much quieter and a lot more painful.
The good news is the new era started honestly. The Bucks finally admitted what everyone could see. Now the work begins.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
