Milwaukee Bucks: Grades And Reactions For Miles Plumlee Trade
By Adam McGee
Trade Motivation
I’m not going to speak to the Charlotte side of this coin, as I’m not quite sure I’d be capable of processing their reasoning for this deal. For the Bucks, though, it’s very simple. This is about financial flexibility, owning past mistakes and learning from them in record time.
As has already been alluded to, the biggest mistake in re-signing Plumlee came not in the Bucks’ decision to bring him back or view him as a piece that could have long-term utility, but in paying a price that there was no apparent reason to reach for.
Perhaps at that time, with Greg Monroe’s disastrous first season fresh in the memory, the long-term center rotation looked likely to be Plumlee, John Henson and Thon Maker. Now that Monroe’s play has turned for the better, Plumlee’s deal started to resemble little more than an obstacle to them attempting to re-sign a player who could play a bigger part in the team’s future.
The front office received plenty of criticism from fans and analysts around the league alike for the contract they signed Plumlee to this summer, and deservedly so. This trade shouldn’t completely absolve a bad decision, but it comes very close to it.
The fact that Milwaukee’s decision-makers were prepared to own their mistakes and right the wrong so quickly is a testament to a degree of forward thinking and accountability that hasn’t always been a feature of their workings. In crude terms, moving on from Plumlee so quickly may have given them an opportunity to do so before other teams really started to think about how ineffectual he’d been in Milwaukee.
Mistakes happen in the NBA, but being able to correct them at no real cost only a few months later is very rare. For all the criticism that was warranted in the summer, John Hammond, Justin Zanik and the rest of Milwaukee’s front office deserve credit for working their way out from between a rock and a hard place.
If Greg Monroe re-signs in the summer, or another new center arrives via free agency, this will be the deal that made that possible.