The Milwaukee Bucks’ 2025-26 season was a disaster, and now we’re finally getting the real story on why. Myles Turner, who signed with Milwaukee before the season, went on his podcast and pulled the curtain back on a locker room with no accountability and a superstar who operated by his own set of rules.
Turner said Doc Rivers never fined players for being late. Not once. So players were late to practices, late to film sessions, and late to flights. All the time. And the behavior trickled straight from the top. Turner specifically called out Giannis Antetokounmpo for showing up to team flights whenever he felt like it, sometimes delaying the entire squad by up to two hours.
“I just knew not to show up until an hour after they said the plane was taking off,” Turner said. “Giannis is gonna show up whenever he wants.” That detail alone tells you everything about the culture in that building last season.
The Bucks went 17-19 with Giannis in the lineup and 14-28 without him. They missed the playoffs for the first time since 2016, snapping a nine-year streak. A fractured, undisciplined roster doesn’t just beat bad teams. And when the going gets tough, players who don’t hold each other accountable fall apart.
Rivers is gone now, replaced by Taylor Jenkins, who built a reputation in Memphis for exactly the kind of structure and accountability that Milwaukee was missing. The hire makes complete sense in hindsight.
Turner isn’t throwing Giannis under the bus out of nowhere. He’s describing what he saw from inside a team that had all the talent in the world and couldn’t hold itself together. When a team’s best player shows up two hours late to a flight and nobody says anything, the message to every other player is that the rules don’t apply to everyone equally. That’s poison. And Myles Turner just confirmed that Milwaukee was drinking it all season long.
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.
