The Milwaukee Bucks should be doing much better to start the 2024-25 season now that Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard have had a full year of experience playing together. Moreover, head coach Doc Rivers now has had a full offseason to make his mark and prepare his squad. But instead, the Bucks have had the worst possible start to the season, going just 1-6 through the first two weeks of the new campaign — which is tied for the worst record in the league at present.
The most troubling aspect of the Bucks' slow start to the season is the fact that Antetokounmpo has been playing incredibly well to start the season, and yet the Bucks have looked lost — as if their title-contending window has slammed shut. At this point, there are no obvious or easy fixes for the Bucks as they look to remedy their ailing roster, and noted pundit Bill Simmons even went as far as to compare the Bucks to the Los Angeles Lakers in terms of immediate future outlook — while calling Milwaukee's prospects even worse.
“They’re basically the Midwest Lakers. They have an awesome big man, they have an aging offensive star who doesn’t play defense. They have nobody else on the team that can play defense and they have no bench. Unlike the Lakers, there’s no fixes,” Simmons said on the most recent episode of his eponymous podcast.
“I don’t see a fix. It’s an atrocious defensive team. You look at every night after night, after night, after night, they’re playing guys in crunch time that would not even play for the Celtics or the Thunder.”
The Bucks have invested so much in their core four of Antetokounmpo, Lillard, Khris Middleton, and Brook Lopez that it'll be difficult for them to acquire the necessary pieces to fix the team's defense. Their depth has also been exposed in the early goings, and they have not developed enough role players via the drafting pipeline to help supplement their aging core.
A seismic change could be required to turn the Bucks' fortunes around, although a game against a fellow 1-6 team, the Utah Jazz, on Thursday night could at least get them back on track for the meantime.
Will the Bucks overhaul their roster on the trade market?
The 2023 offseason will forever be a pivotal one in Bucks lore. They overreacted following a disastrous first-round exit, firing championship-winning head coach Mike Budenholzer and then followed that up by trading away Jrue Holiday and Grayson Allen for Damian Lillard. These moves drastically altered the team's identity, and they have been suffering because of it.
The Bucks had built their incredible roster on an identity of defense, and losing Holiday meant losing a defensive piece that acted as the backbone of their defense. Now, their defense ranks in the bottom-third of the league, and the only way, it seems, for them to remedy this is to go big in the trade market. Perhaps it's time to admit that the Lillard trade was a mistake.
“If you look at what they can do, they can trade Dame I guess. They have Connaughton and Portis at $22 million combined for this year and next year. Portis has been really bad this year. I don’t see any conceivable way this team is a contender. Giannis has been awesome and they’re 1-6,” Simmons added.
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