Following a random drawing at NBA headquarters on Friday, the Milwaukee Bucks will keep their first round draft pick in 2018.
While the Milwaukee Bucks don’t start their first round playoff series until Sunday, Friday afternoon marked an important event for the franchise to bridge the gap between the regular season and post-season.
Following a Board of Governor’s meeting in New York, the annual tradition of random drawings to split draft tiebreakers took place.
The Bucks were among the teams with a vested interest in the results of that drawing, and luck was on their side as they got the result required to keep their pick. As a result, Milwaukee will select at 17 in this summer’s NBA Draft.
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Milwaukee finished in a tie with the Miami Heat for 16th place in the draft order as the Bucks’ loss to the Philadelphia 76ers in their regular season finale led them to a final record of 44-38.
While under normal circumstances the Bucks would have been hoping to win the tiebreaker to move up a spot in the draft order, the terms of the Eric Bledsoe trade earlier in the season meant losing the tiebreaker was required to prevent the pick from conveying to Phoenix this season.
The Bucks’ obligations to send a pick to Phoenix remain, although this result postpones that pick conveying until next year at the earliest. The Bucks will be optimistic that it will be even longer until they have to part ways with that pick, though.
The pick is protected for selections 1-3 and 17-30 next season, meaning even a similar season to this year could keep the 2019 pick in Milwaukee. If that proved to be the case, the pick would then be protected for selections 1-7 in 2020, before potentially becoming unprotected in 2021.
The Milwaukee Bucks will have the 17th selection in the 2018 NBA Draft.#FearTheDeer
— Milwaukee Bucks (@Bucks) April 13, 2018
Of course, picking at no. 17 is far from an unfamiliar situation for the Bucks, although it’s not necessarily a scenario they’ll have positive memories of.
Rashad Vaughn was selected with the 17th pick back in 2015 and ended up out of the NBA before the conclusion of his rookie contract, while last year the Bucks picked D.J. Wilson at that same spot.
There’s still time for the Michigan Wolverine to turn things around, but he failed to make any impact in his rookie season with the Bucks, and didn’t always excel on assignment with the Wisconsin Herd either.
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Of course, the Bucks aren’t incapable of mid-first round magic, and the hope for the organization and their fans will be to find a player closer to Giannis Antetokounmpo‘s level than Rashad Vaughn’s this time around.