Warriors beat writer Danny Emerman shares his thoughts on the NBA
The results are in, and the pollsters were all wrong: The Milwaukee Bucks are on the verge of absolute catastrophe.
Expected to be a title contender, the Bucks have started 2-7 and have no lifeboats. Their only wins are against a depleted 76ers and the tanking Jazz. The lowly Nets and Bulls have handed them Ls. And true contenders have easily discarded them.
Giannis & Co. rank 20th in offensive rating and 22nd in defensive rating.
Not even the most pessimistic prognosticators could have predicted this. Not even with the warning signs from last year — a 17-19 record under Doc Rivers and a subpar season from Damian Lillard.
Any team with Giannis Antetokounmpo presumably would be at least competitive. He’s inarguably one of the five best players in the league. A two-time MVP still in his prime, Antetokounmpo should be good enough to power any team to a winning record.
And he’s playing awesome, one of three players averaging at least 30 points. So is Lillard, who looks more aggressive than last season and is slashing 27/7/5.
That’s how bleak it is: Even with two stars performing at elite levels, the team is still drowning.
Khris Middleton remains sidelined, and he won’t be the savior whenever he returns. Brook Lopez, 36, is no longer a Defensive Player of the Year candidate.
The Bucks have six players in their rotation averaging eight points per game or less who play actual rotation minutes. In their most recent game, a blowout loss to the Knicks, Warriors castoff Ryan Rollins played 12 minutes.
Milwaukee fired Adrian Griffin last year when he led the team to a 30-13 record. Since then, the Bucks are 21-30 including their first-round exit. Their roster is old and has no clear avenues to improve.
How’d the Bucks, who won the 2021 title, get here? Well, they made the type of trade most front offices in their position would have made — the type of trade the Warriors have sought and their fans continue to clamor for.
After getting bounced from the 2023 playoffs, Milwaukee traded Jrue Holiday, Grayson Allen a future first-round pick and two future swaps for Lillard. It was the superstar upgrade they thought they needed, the home-run swing that would put them back on top. Lillard, though, compromised the Bucks’ defense while hurting the team’s ability to add depth because of his $54 million salary. Having two players (Lillard and Antetokounmpo) on max deals makes adding valuable role players extremely challenging, and the Bucks haven’t been able to hit in the draft to backfill minutes.
You know who’d love to have the kind of depth the Warriors have assembled? The Bucks.
Pushing your eggs into the superstar basket is often the fastest way to contention. But it needs to be the right superstar. If it’s not, a blockbuster trade can be the fastest way to purgatory — and wasting, instead of maximizing, a generational player’s prime.
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Familiar Coach of the Year favorites
Steve Kerr and the Cavs’ Kenny Atkinson have been the two best head coaches in the league to start the season. In Vegas, for whatever it’s worth at this point in the season, Atkinson has the best odds to win Coach of the Year and Kerr has the third-best odds.
They were on the same bench last year, and not even they could re-route a nightmare-at-every-turn season into a playoff berth.
Shoutout Kelly Oubre
Acute observer and required social media follow Matt Moore noted that there is a fascinating phenomenon regarding two of the most analytically-minded front offices and a split between play style.
Buddy Hield, Moore noted, has thrived in Golden State after falling out of the 76ers’ rotation. Meanwhile Kelly Oubre, who was terrible with the Warriors, has found success with Philadelphia.
For Hield, off-ball shooting and player movement is much more natural than spotting up around Joel Embiid post-ups. Golden State playing fast — much faster than Philadelphia — helps, too.
Conversely, Oubre doesn’t have to make as quick decisions with the Sixers and has more opportunities to use his athleticism as a cutter.
Fit is everything in the NBA, example number 10,000.
Belief in the Nuggets
Unlike the Bucks, Denver (6-3) still has a good shot to return to contention. They’ve lost the war of attrition over the years with the departures of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Bruce Brown, but they still have a major green flag to wave: the most potent lineup in the NBA.
The five-man combination of Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Christian Braun, Michael Porter Jr. and Aaron Gordon leads the league in points per possessions. The name of the game is scoring points, and the Nuggets’ five best players can get them a bucket against anyone.
Warriors notebook dump
A couple items that have slipped through the cracks of this publication this week…
– NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced that he has consulted Steph Curry on potential All-Star Game renovations. The exhibition has devolved after the Elam Ending gimmick proved to be only a temporary fix.
The All-Star Game is coming home, to the house Joe Lacob built, so hopefully Curry has some good ideas.
– The Athletic reported that Moses Moody’s three-year, $39 million contract extension has some unique incentives attached to it worth an average of $500,000 per year.
Starting next year, if Moody plays at least 1,600 minutes (20 per game), attempts at least nine 3-pointers per 100 possessions and achieves at least 60% true shooting, he’ll earn a significant bonus.
It’s noteworthy that Moody’s performance this year determines, according to the Athletic, whether the incentives are unlikely or likely; if they’re likely, his cap hit increases by half a million dollars.
The details of the deal aren’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things for the franchise, but Moody inked a sweet contract and can play himself into even more money.