With the way their season is going, the Milwaukee Bucks are projected to have a top 10 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. Sure, the thought of adding a young prospect in a loaded draft class could be seen as a silver lining for the current Bucks, whose playoff hopes are fading, but recent history shows that drafting certainly isn't among their strong suits.
Bucks could land a top pick and whiff on another prospect
Drafting is one of the reasons Milwaukee has been starved of youth over the years. Let's look at the team's first-round picks in the Jon Horst era.
D.J. Wilson. Never found his footing and was used as trade bait. Donte DiVincenzo. Decent role player who got traded for aging Serge Ibaka. MarJon Beauchamp. A potential-filled, although raw wing, who never put the pieces together. AJ Johnson. Absolutely stunning pick, given his age and inexperience, who didn't even last one full season with the team. Ouch.
Hindsight applies to some of those to some level, sure. DiVincenzo was coming off a Final Four's Most Outstanding Player run and looked like a legitimate NBA player. Injuries never truly allowed him to blossom with the Milwaukee Bucks. Milwaukee desperately needed a wing, and though Beauchamp lacked experience, there was no denying his athletic tools.
Yet, then you have the most recent example in AJ Johnson, which felt like a reach from the beginning. Years after the Beauchamp swing and miss, the Bucks were still looking for a wing and decided to let players like Ryan Dunn, Kyshawn George, and Terrence Shannon Jr. sit on the board to take Johnson, a point guard who is still years away from contributing even over a year later.
That's not to say Johnson will be a bad player. He has the gifts to be a talented guard in the NBA. Yet, it was a stunning move because the Milwaukee Bucks could have used their rare first-round pick on a ready-to-contribute piece like Dunn, George, or Shannon. To this day, Milwaukee's wing depth is as depleted as it was back then, only amplifying the issue.
All of this is to say that even if the Milwaukee Bucks land a top 10, heck, maybe even top five pick, in what will be a star-studded draft class, there's no guarantee that they land a difference-maker. The front office has done some good things over the years, but drafting has not been among them. They just haven't found help in the first round, and it's plagued them too often.
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