Milwaukee Bucks: 49 years in 49 days – 2002-03 season
By Ti Windisch
The Milwaukee Bucks improved by one win and made the postseason after making a pair of huge trades that impacted the 2002-03 season.
The season: 2002-2003
The record: 42-40
The postseason: 2-4, lost in first round
The story:
Several huge, somewhat random trades have been included in this look back at the history of the Milwaukee Bucks thus far. Another big trade went down in the summer of 2002, as the Bucks traded away a former first overall pick.
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Glenn Robinson joined Kent Benson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the third former first overall pick to get dealt from Milwaukee when the team traded him to Atlanta for Toni Kukoc, Leon Smith and a 2003 first-round pick. The 2003 NBA Draft class would be stacked, but that didn’t help the Bucks in the 2002-03 season.
Neither did Leon Smith, who was released before playing a single minute in Milwaukee. That left Kukoc as the lone part of the Big Dog trade who could actually immediately contribute to the Bucks, and he did so quite modestly in his first season with the team.
Kukoc averaged just 11.6 points per game in 63 games as a Buck before missing significant time due to injury. The early returns from the big trade weren’t great.
Unfortunately for the Bucks, the Big Dog trade was far from the biggest, or worst, deal the team made in that season. In February ahead of the trade deadline, at the behest of George Karl, the Milwaukee Bucks traded away Ray Allen.
Big Dog was good, and became Milwaukee’s second leading scorer, but he was a little older and didn’t have the upper ceiling that Allen did. Regardless, Karl wasn’t a big fan of Allen’s, and the star was sent to Seattle along with Kevin Ollie, Ron Murray and a draft pick.
In exchange, the Bucks got Gary Payton and Desmond Mason. Payton was 34 by the time he got to Milwaukee, and his Bucks tenure would be short. He ended up bolting after his 28 regular season games, although he did score nearly 20 points per game in his time with Milwaukee.
Mason was younger than Allen, but he was also nowhere near the player that Allen was. He scored 14.8 points per game with the Bucks in the end of his first year with the team, as the team chased the postseason.
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In the span of several months, Milwaukee had traded two of their big three from the 2001 Eastern Conference Finals. The new big three was weird, as the Bucks were led by Payton, Sam Cassell and Michael Redd, who became Milwaukee’s third-leading scorer among players who ended the season with the team due to all of the trades.
That team, despite all of the moving parts and talent downgrades, won one more game than the Bucks did in the previous season. The 42-40 Milwaukee Bucks qualified for the 2003 postseason, and found themselves up against the New Jersey Nets in the first round.
Future familiar faces Jason Kidd and Kenyon Martin led the Nets against a Bucks team helmed by Gary Payton and Sam Cassell. The new-look Bucks put up a fight early in the series, swapping wins and battling to a 2-2 tie leading into a Game 5.
Next: 49 years in 49 days: 2001-02 season
The Nets would go on to take over though, winning Games 5 and 6 to end the Gary Payton era in Milwaukee quite early. A team that was stagnant last summer was now completely in flux heading into the offseason. The night was dark and filled with terrors.