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Is It Time For Milwaukee To Swing For The Fences?

By Adam McGee

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The off-season always raises a ton of hypothetical scenarios, and sometimes they develop into pretty serious philosophical (in a basketball context) questions. With the Milwaukee Bucks and the rest of the league getting ready to draft and then pursue free agents in the next two weeks, we’ve reached fever-pitch in that regard too.

Case in point, was a question posed by our very own Brett Abramczyk on Twitter earlier today:

This is the sort of question that could keep you up at night, and the sort of realities that are facing the Bucks’ front office right now. As this season has evidenced better than most, there are so many ways to build a team to be successful in the NBA.

You could be like the champions, Golden State, and build slowly over time, lucking out more often than not whether that’s with Steph Curry with the seventh pick, with Draymond Green with the 35th, with Andre Iguodala in free agency, or just with a guy like Andrew Bogut staying healthy.

That’s a series of moves that took more than five years.

Then you have a team like the Atlanta Hawks, who were in many way the NBA’s answer to Moneyball last season. Sure, they had talent, but with a group of underrated and undervalued guys from within their own squad and around the league, they managed to build a winner.

There’s also the Houston Rockets who’ve won the mega-star free agent sweepstakes on not one, but two occasions (James Harden and Dwight Howard), and then the Cleveland Cavaliers who are lucky enough to pull on the heartstrings of the best player in the world (Matthew Dellave…I mean, LeBron James).

They were your four conference finalists and they all did things in their own unique way, and the Bucks should follow suit with their own philosophies of team-building. The big question is how aggressive should the team be in chasing their goals?

Milwaukee has a good young coach, and a talented and still developing roster in place. They’ll have the chance to add the 17th and 46th picks, and most likely a couple of high caliber free agents also.

That sounds like a good summer already (assuming the decisions are good, and I know that’s a dangerous assumption), but could the Bucks have a chance to make things so much better with a bit of bravery?

Let me turn to another tweet that got me thinking to show you where I’m going with this:

So would it be worth Milwaukee’s while to make a call to Charlotte? Sure they could draft Bobby Portis, or Kevon Looney, or R.J. Hunter at 17, but would Milwaukee not be better served with someone like Willie Cauley-Stein or Myles Turner?

A scenario like that one could leave the Bucks with no need to splash their free agency cash on a center, and give them the chance to build a more well-rounded roster and bench with their cap space.

Sure, it all boils down to what they’d have to give up, or in this case it may be more about what they’d have to take back, but these can be the tough decisions that contenders are built out of.

Jordan Treske wrote about the crossroads that John Henson could be facing this summer, and in a situation like that it’s very simple. If the Bucks don’t view him as an integral piece of what they’re building, they need to try to find a deal that maximizes his worth to the team.

The same applies for a veteran like O.J. Mayo. Mayo is on a pretty hefty contract for his role with Milwaukee, but that doesn’t mean that by dangling him in front of a team who are ready to contend, the Bucks couldn’t find a favorable deal.

Hey, how about if the Bucks found a way to keep their true core assets in tact, move up in the draft, and create even more space for free agency?

Of course, that’s much easier said than done, and NBA general managers are smarter than ever, but these are the type of questions that need to be asked?

Should the Bucks draft for the highest ceiling or the highest floor?

Should they start making aggressive moves now, or keep building patiently?

We’ll have the answers to how the Bucks view these questions sooner rather than later.

Next: BTBP Mock NBA Draft: Editor's Edition

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