3. The sins of the past are still felt in the present
NBA teams are not perfect. Even the best run organizations make mistakes, and those mistakes often keep a team from reaching the best version of itself. The Golden State Warriors have nailed almost every decision they have made recently, but even they make mistakes.
Other teams make mistakes that end up being crippling, such as the Memphis Grizzlies or Portland Trail Blazers being weighed down by massive contracts to middling players. The Los Angeles Lakers made a pair of bad mistakes in 2016 and still managed to add LeBron James, but it cost them young talent to do so.
Milwaukee made smaller splashes in the summer of 2016; rather than commit $16 million or more to a single player, it signed two players to contracts that are rough a few years later. Matthew Dellavedova is making $9.6 million this season in the last year of the $38.4 million contract he signed in 2016. At the time he was a tough defensive guard fresh off big Finals performances. Now he is the team’s third point guard.
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John Henson had more of an impact last season for the Bucks, starting 69 games and taking part in most of the Bucks’ best lineups. But as a ground-bound center with no range (1-for-13 career from deep) Henson is a bit of a dinosaur, not stretching opposing defenses in any direction. He will make $11.4 million this season in the third year of his contract.
Last season the Bucks re-signed swingman Tony Snell to a four-year, $46 million contract only to see him relegated to a more muted role in his second season with the team. If Budenholzer can help him develop back into a reliable option he will be worth that contract, but the long commitment means the team lacked flexibility to change options on the wing.
In total that is $31.5 million committed to three players who are role players at best on this season’s team. It also doesn’t include the $3.8 million still on the books from waiving and stretching Spencer Hawes and Larry Sanders. Sanders has not played on the team since February of 2015.
In all, that limited their ability to make a major move in free agency, instead leaving them with just a pair of exceptions to add Ersan Ilyasova and Brook Lopez. Both look to be solid players for the Bucks, but they weren’t the best the market had to offer.
The other side effect is that the team had to choose between adding talent and bringing back Jabari Parker. Whether or not the team would have brought him back at a number that worked for him, in signing Lopez and Ilyasova, that option was taken out of their hands. This offseason was about moves on the margins, because the decisions of the past two summers prevented anything more than that.