Bucks Free Agency Update

You wouldn’t know from watching ESPN that it is baseball season right now or that the World Cup and Wimbleton have been going on. All you hear about right now is NBA free agency. Every other story is on LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh amongst others.

Although it was my Bucks fan dream for Milwaukee to sign Dwayne Wade, I knew that it wasn’t going to happen. What the Bucks have done instead is what I think is the second best approach they could take. They have taken advantage of teams trying to clear salary cap space to sign these NBA divas and obtained decent players for reasonable (by NBA terms) wages. These moves are not going to lead the Bucks to a championship in and of themselves but it should keep them in the playoff hunt for the next couple years.

In the past couple weeks, the Bucks have signed veteran Corey Maggette from Golden State, the young and upcoming Chris Douglas-Roberts from New Jersey, the well-travelled Drew Gooden from the Clippers and their own free agent John Salmons who almost single handedly led the Bucks to the playoffs last spring.

When you look at these names, nothing jumps out at you too much but I think the Bucks have made a huge upgrade to their roster. Maggette had one of the best years of his 11-year career last year with the Warriors. His role will most likely be to back up Salmons. In order to obtain Maggette, the Bucks dealt Charlie Bell and Dan Gadzuric. Both players although serviceable and talented have shown in their fairly lengthy tenures with the Bucks that they weren’t going to help get this team very far, even as role players. And Gadzuric especially was taking up a lot of salary space. In some ways, I look at the subtraction of Bell and Gadzuric being even more important than the addition of Maggette.

Chris Douglas-Roberts was a gift from the Nets. He showed great potential last year with a terrible team. He ended up not playing much the second half of the season after a change in coaches and philosophies. He will back up Carlos Delfino and probably get plenty of playing time especially if he can adopt Scott Skiles’ approach of tenacious defense.

The Drew Gooden acquisition doesn’t impress me as much. However, they are not paying him as much as some other teams have spent on average big men. Gooden will likely start next to Andrew Bogut. And if he can conjure up the way he played in Cleveland a couple years ago when he played power forward along side a top-notch NBA center, this could be a good move for Milwaukee. When you also consider that the Bucks also have three other guys who can play power forward/center (and maybe four if they keep Kurt Thomas), they should be very strong inside both offensively and defensively.

So this is the deepest the Bucks roster has been in many many years. They should be able to go 10 or 11 deep easily. They will need that without a superstar. That is what frustrates me most though is that we don’t have a superstar. The teams that win NBA titles, have superstars. What the Bucks are banking on is that Brandon Jennings, Andrew Bogut and possibly John Salmons can become superstar level players. If that happens, then the Bucks go from a 5-8 seed in the playoffs to a contender.

We’ll see. Regardless, though it is pleasant talking about a team that should make the playoffs instead of debating what lottery pick they will get next year. The Bucks are finally back into the conversation.