Eleven years of excessive evaluation!
Three weeks from today! What, you don’t have Monday, September 30th marked in your calendar? I suppose that’s fair, because it’s not really the start of the 2024–25 NBA season… but it is Milwaukee Bucks Media Day. That means we’re a little bit late starting our yearly Ranking The Roster series than we were last year, but you know what happened a mere nine days after we concluded the 2023 iteration? The Bucks swapped out our ranking’s third and tenth-place finishers for one Damian Lillard.
I don’t expect similar late-offseason fireworks this year, so I think we’re safe to get it going again! Here’s some quick background: for a decade now, dating back to Brew Hoop founder Frank Madden’s tenure, we’ve asked for your opinion in rating the Bucks’ roster in the lead-up to each season. The criteria for this rating has changed, yet every single year, going back to the inaugural edition of RTR, Giannis has won. Spoiler alert: he’ll win again this year, and will likely continue winning for several more years to come. Khris Middleton has also routinely finished as number two since 2017, albeit with one year where he ceded the silver to Jrue Holiday. Might this be his first year since 2020 where he’s third?
Anywho, before Milwaukee was a title contender every season, this was a much more cut-and-dry ranking of the players’ talents, or based on how important they were to the franchise’s future. In recent seasons, we’ve rated each guy on his postseason potential; basically, how important is this Buck towards postseason success? Once again, I’ll quote one of my predecessors, co-managing editor emeritus (yes, that’s a title) Adam Paris for how you should weigh your votes in the weeks ahead:
Postseason success should be paramount in your mind when considering your rankings. Regular season competency is a bonus, especially if they can help the team get to a higher seed that yields dividends in the Playoffs, but think about how you envision each individual player factoring in when postseason games arrive.
With that, let’s again look at a multi-year historical summary of all players currently on the roster:
Gone are mainstays Thanasis Antetokounmpo (fifteenth last year, and every year except 2021, where he finished twelfth), Jrue Holiday (second, third, third, third), and Grayson Allen (sixth, ninth, seventh, tenth). Gone too are the seventh- (Jae Crowder), eighth- (Malik Beasley), and twelfth- (Robin Lopez) place finishers from a year ago, plus all the then-two-way players. In are much more intriguing veterans like Gary Trent Jr., Delon Wright, and Taurean Prince, joined by the two rookies A.J. Johnson and Tyler Smith. Factor in Dame and you’ve got nine new Bucks from this time last year (including the two-way guys) and five new names on the standard roster compared to when we last saw the team in May.
An interesting note I find when comparing last year’s results to years prior: I stated last August that for three years running, six of the top seven players as determined by our readership returned to the team. Of course, that was before the Lillard-Holiday trade. Otherwise, it would have remained the case for a fourth year. To that end, here’s what I also wrote last year on August 23rd, a month and a day before that trade:
Will that trend continue this year? Unless we see a trade—which I’d say for such an established group would qualify as major, no matter which of last year’s septet of top players goes—shuffle things up, it seems likely it will.
Major it was! Goodbye went that trend. And now it seems very likely we’ll see movement closer to the top.
This year, Pat Connaughton seems all but guaranteed to lose his spot among the top seven, not having the benefit of the high from a strong postseason as he did a year ago. Bobby Portis might fall too in favor of Trent, the Bucks’ projected fifth starter. The two new veterans in Wright and Prince seem likely to finish among the top seven or either. Then the sextet of young guys who could usurp someone older: two recent draftees—one of whom showed out in Summer League, three wings who each seem to interest all fans, and… MarJon Beauchamp (maybe not him). Plus, some new two-way guys who might actually not get cut before the preseason starts!
We’ll have a daily post each day from now into early October, just a few days before the Bucks tip off their preseason on October 6th, with a writeup on the “winner” of whichever spot in our exercise plus a poll where you’ll then vote for the Least Important Buck (in terms of their ability to contribute in the postseason) among several options. We’ll then continue the polling all the way down to our 6’11” Greek formality. Once again, we’ll include another poll which we call the Gut Check, where you rank the day’s “winner” on how confident you are that he’ll be in the 2025 postseason rotation on a 1–5 scale (1 being not on the floor at all and 5 being playing heavy minutes). Let’s once again see how the returning Bucks fared in that area in last year’s RTR:
9. Chris Livingston – 1.29
8. Andre Jackson Jr. – 2.12
7. AJ Green – 2.38
6. MarJon Beauchamp – 2.80
5. Pat Connaughton – 4.17
4. Brook Lopez – 4.27
3. Bobby Portis – 4.46
2. Khris Middleton – 4.82
1. Giannis Antetokounmpo – 4.53
Our Gut Check on Giannis was skewed a bit by 9% of votes jokingly (or was it Celtics fans???) giving him “1 – Not in the rotation at all.” Har de har har har! Also, isn’t it interesting that AJax and Green, who both rated around “2 – Might play a few rotation minutes here and there” got so much run last postseason? Recall that there was an injury or two.
Ok, enough blathering—it’s high time we get to the poll. Like last year, this one will have a few more choices than subsequent polls, just to get an idea of how everyone’s feeling. As usual, we’ll have the results plus a discussion of the eighteenth-most important/least important Buck tomorrow, then another poll for the seventeenth/second-least.