The Milwaukee Bucks failed to improve after their rough 2006-07 season, leading to an even worse year in 2007-08.
The season: 2007-08
The record: 26-56
The postseason: Or nah
The story:
The Milwaukee Bucks were one of the NBA’s worst teams during the 2006-07 NBA season. That’s never fun, but there is a silver lining to sucking in the NBA–you typically get a good shot at a cost-controlled impact player through the NBA Draft.
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Milwaukee had the sixth overall pick in the 2007 NBA Draft as a result of their poor season. That was a pretty damn good draft, featuring Kevin Durant, Al Horford, and Mike Conley in the first four picks.
Of course the Bucks didn’t end up with a good enough pick to go for any of those guys, but even the later lottery picks contained some diamonds in the rough. Corey Brewer, Joakim Noah and Thaddeus Young were all picked after Milwaukee’s sixth pick.
Noah had the best career of that bunch, but unfortunately with Andrew Bogut already in Milwaukee it didn’t make sense for the Bucks to take him. Of course the Bucks went ahead and took a seven-footer anyway, just not one nearly as capable as Noah.
Yi Jianlian was Milwaukee’s pick. The publicity around the former Chinese Basketball Association Finals MVP was undeniable, as was the fact that most players picked in the lottery were better than Yi was.
Jianlian earned the nickname The Chairman thanks to one of the most infamous draft workouts in league history. He posted up a chair. The video is nowhere to be found on the internet, sadly, but Bucks fans from this era will doubtlessly remember a lot about the Yi draft.
Milwaukee’s offense cratered with the addition of Yi to a starting five that already couldn’t shoot with Bogut and Desmond Mason on the team, and despite Michael Redd‘s best efforts the Bucks offense fell to the bottom ten in the NBA.
That coupled with a Bucks defense that had been statistically horrible in the last several years cooked up a bad recipe for Milwaukee basketball. The Bucks defensive rating bottomed out, literally, as no team allowed more points per 100 possessions than Milwaukee did in the 2007-08 NBA season.
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Redd and Mo Williams served as the main catalysts on offense, with Redd pouring in 22.7 points per game and Williams adding 17.2 per game. The next-best scorer was Bogut, with just over 14 points per game.
In what would be his last great scoring season with the Milwaukee Bucks, Michael Redd scored his 10,000th point with the franchise. Only sixth Bucks have ever done that, with Redd being the most recent player to do so. The list is a who’s who of great Bucks players from history: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Glenn Robinson, Sidney Moncrief, Bob Dandridge and Marques Johnson.
He may not have found much success with the franchise, but Redd spent a really good prime in Milwaukee, and ended up fourth on the list of Bucks’ All-Time scorers. The man got buckets.
Next: 49 years in 49 days: 2006-07 season
Unfortunately, right or wrong, he isn’t remembered as fondly as any of those other names due to the lack of winning seasons the Milwaukee Bucks enjoyed during the Redd era.