The Milwaukee Bucks may have expected more from Miles Plumlee this season, but without steady playing time it’s not a shock that he hasn’t been a consistent contributor.
Miles Plumlee is not having an easy time of it with the Milwaukee Bucks this season. Then again, Plumlee hasn’t really ever had an easy time of it, although at least he got to play in some of his other stops.
He spent more time in the D-League than in the NBA in his rookie year, before being traded to the Phoenix Suns as a part of the deal that sent Luis Scola to the Indiana Pacers. That’s where Plumlee first hit his stride, starting 79 games on a team that won 48 games.
The season after that successful campaign, the Suns sent Plumlee to the Bucks as a part of the deal that landed Milwaukee Michael Carter-Williams. He didn’t play all too often that season, and was a forgotten part of the roster for the first few months of the next season. With John Henson receiving a contract extension and Greg Monroe getting signed to a max deal, Plumlee was an afterthought.
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Then, in late January, the frustrated Bucks gave Plumlee a chance to play. He brought tons of energy, as a player that hasn’t gotten to play for a few months will do. The team looked good with him out there, and he was given a few starts.
Those starts coincided with the beginning of the Point Giannis Antetokounmpo experiment, which really made Plumlee look good. Eventually he lost the starting job but continued to get lots of minutes, and Giannis gushed about how he and Plumlee were on the same page.
Let’s recap: through four full NBA seasons, Plumlee had been a full-time starter for one of them. He scored more than 8.1 points per game in exactly zero of his NBA seasons. He had an above-average PER in one of them, and he played under 900 total minutes that year.
Plumlee’s resumé was (and is) that of a pretty good role player, one who has started on some good teams but who clearly was not the engine driving those teams to victory. Despite the obvious signs that Plumlee is not one of the better starting centers in the NBA, the Milwaukee Bucks awarded him with a $50 million deal over four seasons.
That deal could make some sense if the Bucks were in desperate need of a center–Plumlee knows the scheme and players in Milwaukee, and he’s not an objectively bad player. The situation was actually the opposite of that, though–the case could be made that the Bucks had already tied up too much money in John Henson and Greg Monroe before Plumlee inked his new deal.
Plumlee got eight starts to begin the 2016-17 campaign before losing that gig. Even as a starter Plumlee didn’t really get a chance to do anything–he played under ten minutes in two of those starts, and over 20 minutes only once.
Over his next nine games, Plumlee got one start but averaged just 9.4 minutes per game. In the last three games of that stretch he played a combined 7.8 minutes. After that Plumlee got five straight DNP-Coach’s Decision, followed by a whooping 2 minutes of action.
For exactly a month from that two minutes of game time, Plumlee never played more than two consecutive games without sitting out at least once. He then played four straight games, although he only played more than six minutes once in that stretch, before getting yet another DNP-CD.
Plumlee then got three straight starts, with at least 15 minutes of playing time in each of them, before catching another DNP-CD so that Thon Maker could start in the Bucks’ last game.
Forget the lackluster numbers Plumlee has posted this year–how could he be expected to do anything but struggle with the playing time he’s gotten?
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Plumlee has played 32 games this season. In 18 of them, including two of his 12 starts, he’s gotten less than 10 minutes on the floor. How much can you really ask for a player getting three or four minutes at a time?
Some players are great at playing those tiny chunks of minutes. Scorers can come in and take a few shots, and sometimes rack up some good point totals in just a few minutes. That’s not Plumlee’s game at all though–he’s a steady presence there to finish lobs and block some shots.
It’s tough to make an impact as a player who doesn’t get the ball on offense often in five minutes a night. The same applies to John Henson, really.
Both of them are in the same unfortunate situation. There just aren’t enough minutes for both of them to look decent while Greg Monroe, who’s been the best center on the roster, gets his bench run.
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So while it’s certainly fair to mock Plumlee’s big contract, especially when looking at the context it was signed in, it’s not exactly his fault he hasn’t been the same exciting player he was for parts of last season.