The Milwaukee Bucks have done a solid job of upgrading their backcourt this summer.
With the additions of Delon Wright and Gary Trent Jr. via free agency and AJ Johnson via the draft, the team has gotten younger, more athletic and more defensive-minded, which were some of the most glaring problems it had last season. Yet, if they want to lean a bit more toward that direction and keep adding similar players, there are some things they could do.
Bleacher Report's Grant Hughes has proposed a mock trade that could make that happen. The Chicago Bulls are in a weird spot where they seem to be willing to rebuild but are maybe a bit too good for that, so contenders could find there some pieces to strengthen their rosters with. Zach LaVine is the most discussed one, but Hughes has a different idea that we can break down next.
Analyzing the mock trade between the Bucks and Bulls
In this trade, the Bucks get Ayo Dosunmu, sending Pat Connaughton and a 2031 first-round swap in exchange. This way, Milwaukee would add a promising young player to the roster while moving away from a veteran who was already in trade talks before the trade deadline.
Being just 24 years old, Dosunmu is an interesting player that has probably caught some team's eyes, but it's unclear what the Bulls want to do with him.
He looked very good last season, but he's not the kind of player you'd build a team around, so Chicago might be looking to trade him and get some draft capital. Although not as glaring as recently traded Alex Caruso, he looks like the kind of player who's built to be a solid role player in a winning context, so if they're going into tanking mode, he might not fit at all.
He could be in a similar position as P.J. Washington was last year. Nobody in Charlotte thought Washington wasn't a good player; he just wasn't on a team where he could thrive as he did in Dallas, where he was assigned the 3-and-D role.
The Hornets saw he was a bit older than their current young core and his market value was probably at its highest, so they decided to trade him for a first-round pick they could use in the future. The question now is do the Bulls see Dosunmu in the same way?
We'll get to that later, though. First, let's start breaking down this mock trade by analyzing the point of view of both parties involved.