As free agents continue to sign with teams and are taken off the free agent board, only a certain crop remains without a chance to keep playing in the league. And among those names are the likes of MarJon Beauchamp, Andre Jackson Jr., Chris Livingston, and Tyler Smith - all former Bucks draft picks of the past few years.
Recent Bucks draft picks are still unsigned as the offseason ends
For a franchise that spent the better part of this decade trying to thread the needle between maximizing a championship window and building out an organic youth movement, that cluster of names is a tough pill to swallow. These were supposed to be the foundational pillars of Milwaukee’s secondary wave. Even the second-rounders were supposed to be cost-controlled upside swings meant to sustain depth as the team's veteran core aged out after the championship year.
Instead, they’ve become a glaring piece of evidence of a harsh truth: the Milwaukee Bucks, until further notice, have been and still are a thoroughly bad drafting team.
Yes, Jon Horst deserves all the credit in the world for the takeaway from this year's draft, and the countless other players he's gotten value out of in the undrafted market. AJ Green, Pete Nance, and Cormac Ryan were never supposed to be as good as they are now. Even Ryan Rollins, a late second-rounder, only began turning heads as a Milwaukee Buck. But the record with botched first-round selections also speaks for itself.
What's equally frustrating for this writer is that the pieces that did eventually work out only flourished once they left town. Think the likes of Donte DiVincenzo, Sam Merrill, and Sandro Mamukelashvili, all of whom the Bucks gave up on way too quickly before other teams struck gold with their sudden development. All it took with those names was a chance. And that is also all it took with some of these names still unsigned. They never got those chances, even despite the flashes they showed.
The Bucks now have a chance to give out those opportunities to develop more freely. They have a litany of names, including Ryan Rollins, Kasparas Jakucionis, Kel'el Ware, Ousmane Dieng, Bogoljub Markovic, Brayden Burries, and Nate Ament, who are all rearing for an opportunity to show they can be something in this league.
Milwaukee's youth movement is still underway, no matter what
The record with drafting is what it is, but of course, the Bucks have a lot more reason to be optimistic about their youth movement these days.
Brayden Burries finished with a spot on the All-Summer League First Team and has shown he's good enough to start. Nate Ament still has his doubters but showed more than enough flashes throughout Summer League to warrant more opportunities during the regular season. And perhaps the biggest thing is that they now have a proven player development coach at the helm in Taylor Jenkins, who should be much more generous with chances for young players than his predecessor ever was.
The future suddenly looks fast, switchable, and sharp. But looking backward requires a certain level of unblinking honesty about how the front office operated during the height of the Giannis Antetokounmpo era. As the rest of the league sorts through the remaining prospects available, it’s worth staring that ugly history in the face.
The new era of Bucks basketball is bright, but if this front office wants to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, they’ll need to prove that their talent evaluation has finally caught up to their ambition. Here's hoping their days of draft busts are firmly in the rearview mirror.
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