There's not really much else to say at this point, is there? If you've been paying attention, you know with absolute certainty that the Milwaukee Bucks didn’t lose their season in one night. They lost it one front office decision at a time.
Milwaukee’s front office turned a contender into a bloated, broken roster and every misstep adds up to an offseason full of regret. And what has frustrated us the most is that this pattern didn't start an offseason ago, or even two.
This wasn’t a team undone by bad injury luck. It was undone by bad planning all the way back to their championship-winning season.
Milwaukee wasted one of their only picks on potential over production
When Milwaukee drafted AJ Johnson, it was a classic swing-for-upside move.
Sure, you could probably make the argument that Johnson's little-known potential was tantalizing, but at the end of the day, that move was the kind you make when your timeline is three years out, not when you're trying to squeeze the last drops of a title run out of a 33-year-old Damian Lillard and a prime Giannis Antetokounmpo.
The pick never made sense. Milwaukee desperately needed immediate help in that moment: a rotation-caliber wing, a perimeter defender, someone who could play spot minutes in the playoffs. Guys like Ryan Dunn were available. Instead, they took a teenager with no defensive foundation and a years-away timeline.
Granted, Johnson had raised eyebrows all across the Bucks fandom, this writer included. His size, lightning-quick drives and promising shot-creation looked like all the hallmarks of exactly the type of player you would want next to Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Then, Johnson logged a total of 44 minutes through seven games for Milwaukee in the regular season before he was eventually traded. That’s on the front office as much as it is on the coach.
The Kuzma-Middleton trade was all risk, and as it turns out, no reward
Speaking of the trade, that was, to be fair, a bit of a bold gamble — trading Khris Middleton, your second-best player in franchise history, along with the only bit of future upside you had left in Johnson all for someone like Kyle Kuzma.
It was, if anything, proof that bold doesn’t necessarily mean smart.
To be fair to general manager Jon Horst, he likely felt he had to do something, anything, to right the sinking ship, and Kuzma looked like a theoretical fit at the time.
It made sense on its face: more athleticism, better availability and younger legs. But what they actually got was a minus defender who struggled to adjust to playing without the ball. His off-ball awareness was bad. His defensive effort was worse. And the ball-stopping, inefficient scoring didn’t scale with Damian Lillard or Giannis Antetokounmpo.
They swapped out a stabilizing veteran, a known commodity in the postseason, for volatility. And then hoped it would work in a playoff crucible. It didn’t. Let's hope Milwaukee's new flexibility this offseason due to this trade getting them out of the second apron helps them make up for this.
Coaching mismanagement exposed the roster flaws
You can’t talk about Milwaukee’s collapse without pointing fingers at Doc Rivers. But the deeper issue is that the roster gave him no good choices.
Still, Doc Rivers actively made things within his control worse. He refused to move off the Brook Lopez–Bobby Portis frontcourt pairing, even as it got hunted in every pick-and-roll. He buried Andre Jackson Jr., the one young player with real defensive upside, under the guise of a supposed lack of offensive improvements. Yet he never solved the team’s glaring lack of athleticism and size once an option like Jericho Sims was available.
The way the Milwaukee Bucks went out should tell you all you need to know about how they've been coached throughout this season. There was simply no system, no cohesion, and ultimately, no game plan that kept them bought in to a specific identity.
Perimeter defense? Nonexistent. Backup point guard? Unsolved. Role clarity? Missing.
But these were not in-season problems alone — they were structural weaknesses that started in the offseason and were never corrected.
And so what happens now? The Bucks are boxed in by a warchest that is practically empty, a roster full of aging veterans, and a star in Giannis Antetokounmpo whose patience is clearly wearing thin.
It was one misfire after another from a front office that forgot what a contender needs. And now the Milwaukee Bucks just re-signed the very architect of those front office decisions.
This was supposed to be a championship team. Instead, the front office bet on long-term projects, defensive liabilities, and ideas that never had a real plan behind them. They handed Doc Rivers a broken roster and hoped the brand names would carry them.
They didn’t. And now Milwaukee’s path back to the top of a surging Eastern Conference is murkier than ever.
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