Should the Milwaukee Bucks start Bobby Portis over Brook Lopez?

Ever since being inserted into the starting lineup in place of Brook Lopez at the beginning of November, Bobby Portis has given the Milwaukee Bucks a huge boost and he’s playing some of the best basketball of his career right now.

This has prompted some fans to wonder if the Bucks should continue to start the 26-year-old once Lopez returns, given his ability to stretch the floor better than the Bucks’ incumbent starter and his energy and tenacity.

I’ll make this quick: no, they shouldn’t. Lopez is far too valuable to what the Bucks do on defense and Portis still has a ways to go on that end. Portis can still provide the same spacing and energy off the bench, which the Bucks will need with the second unit.

However, it does bring up an interesting question about Portis’ long-term future with the Bucks and if he can transition into a starting role.

Is Bobby Portis the long-term solution at center for the Milwaukee Bucks?

Lopez is 33, will be 34 in April, and his contract will expire after the 2022-23 season when he’ll be 35. Save for this back injury that will cost him over 20 games so far, he’s been pretty healthy to this point of his Bucks career. But 35 is 35 and he has a lot of miles on him at this point, at some point he’ll need to take a backseat (if he even still wants to play in two years).

Portis has one more year on his contract after this, but it’s a player option. When the contract was signed, no one was expecting Portis to pick up the player option and that’s been reinforced with his strong play this season.

The Bucks will have Portis’ Early Bird Rights this offseason (should he decline his player option, as expected) so they’ll be able to give him a nice raise up to 175 percent of what he’s making this year (so roughly 7.6 million dollars).

Portis has expressed nothing but positive sentiments towards the Bucks organization and city of Milwaukee. He made it known that there were bigger offers available to him but chose to stay with the Bucks because of the comfortability he feels with the organization and how they made him better as a player (winning also doesn’t hurt too).

I noted this past offseason that the Bucks were making a subtle shift to the age of players they were bringing in, specifically with Portis and Grayson Allen who are in the primes of their respective careers.

This is more in line with the timeline that Giannis Antetokounmpo is on, who will be 27 in December. This 12-game stretch of Portis starting has also shown that he’s a great fit alongside Antetokounmpo, even if he’s not the same level of defender that Lopez is.

Since starting his first game this season on November 7th, the duo of Portis and Antetokounmpo is plus-19.1 in 195 minutes, per NBA.com/stats. He’s connected on nearly 50 percent of his 3-point attempts and is averaging over five attempts per game in his 11 games as a starter.

Even with Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday struggling at times offensively, Portis has been able to pick up the slack with some big performances, most notably his 28-point double-double against the Detroit Pistons or his 24-point, 15-rebound game against the Orlando Magic.

He has also proven to be a very productive individual rebounder while also being a good team rebounder, which is more important and why Lopez is so valuable in that area. Overall defensively, as I said, he still has a ways to go but has shown to be a useful enough rim protector and is more mobile than Lopez so he can be a solid switchable big man.

Although he still gets picked on by guards and wings on switches and can be exploited at times, having Antetokounmpo as the help defender makes up for that if Portis gets blown by.

It will be interesting how Portis’ free agency goes (if he chooses to go to free agency and not re-sign with the Bucks before that) and if he decides to take a lower-than-market-value deal like he did this past offseason.

If he chooses to stay, that would be another key, prime-aged rotation player locked up for another season to go along with Grayson Allen. We’ve seen how Allen and Antetokounmpo fit together, then adding in Portis has also made for successful lineups with a plus-14.7 net rating in 168 total minutes.

It’s clear the Bucks wanted Allen to be a long-term piece and would be more than happy to have Portis back next season, but it appears they may have found more than they expected when they initially signed him two offseasons ago.

It’s been great to see the 180-degree turn Portis’ career has done after being cast out as a liability on defense who couldn’t provide value to a winning team. Even the turnaround from being benched in the Nets series to now being a hugely valuable member of the rotation and potentially a key piece going forward.