Tracking the larger sentiments of Bucks fans week by week
While Khris Middleton won’t appear tonight in the front end of the Bucks’ back-to-back, the conversation around his current role on the team ramped up in recent weeks as the starting lineup sputtered offensively. To be fair, that’s not really Middleton’s fault: the Bucks’ offense as a whole is only a tick above league average both over the last two weeks and over the entire season. And when he’s on the court, the Bucks are 5.5 points better per 100 possessions, and his net rating is +8.0 (meaning the Bucks have done well defensively with him playing too), good for 85th percentile among all players in a sample of 354 minutes. He’s also coming off a 25-minute, 16-point, five-assist day in New York on 7/9 shooting.
But Doc Rivers says Middleton is back on the bench in part because he’s still on a minute restriction, as his ankles are still sore thanks to his offseason surgeries. On New Year’s Eve, he hit 31 minutes but his workload tapered a bit thereafter, though he started the next two games. Rivers talks about finding continuity with the starting lineup—hard to do when Middleton is hovering around 25 minutes. I can understand that, considering you need to stagger him alongside Giannis and Damian Lillard.
The rub is that the Bucks will need Middleton on the floor in closing situations as the season draws to a close and in the postseason. A reasonable goal for him would be to get back to the 32ish minutes he averaged down the stretch last year after coming back from that bad ankle sprain. He was then able to put in multiple 40-minute efforts against Indiana in the first round. Hopefully, that minute load isn’t too far off.
So in the meantime, what do you do? Bringing him off the bench might allow for optimal lineup combinations while his playing time is capped, but it would behoove the Bucks to run him alongside players he’ll be paired with in those high-leverage situations to come. That obviously means continuing to play him alongside both Dame and Giannis as much as possible while also keeping him in command of second-unit groupings with guys like Bobby Portis and AJ Green.
But something we’re not seeing enough of at all is him alongside Taurean Prince: they’ve played together just 34 minutes so far, the fourth-least frequent pairing Middleton has among the 12 guys he’s played with in 2024–25. That adds up, you might be thinking, since Prince assumed then reassumed Middleton’s role as the other starting forward. Prince was clearly brought aboard to be Middleton’s backup.
But that’s a forward pairing that could be really helpful in key spots, with either Giannis or Brook Lopez at the five. The two complement each other pretty well, with Prince making up for Middleton’s probably mediocre-at-best defense and Middleton able to run the offense where Prince rarely puts the ball on the floor. It’s a small sample size, but the +18.5 net rating of those two and the 107.8 defensive rating is good enough to explore.
In this week’s Tuesday Tracker, we want your opinions on Middleton’s ideal place and what that means for other players, namely Prince. Next, you can pick between a few starting lineups including Andre Jackson Jr., Gary Trent Jr., and Green. We’ll also check in on some trade speculation with the deadline just over three weeks away, with a follow up on our Jimmy Butler questions from last week.
As always, this poll will be open until midnight Central on Friday, and we’ll post the results later that day. Thanks for voting!