NBA: Top 5 biggest what-if draft selections from the 1990s
By Steve Zavala
5. 1994 — Jason Kidd to the Milwaukee Bucks
Following 12 straight playoff appearances, the Milwaukee Bucks were a team free-falling into disarray by the 1990s. The likes of future Hall of Famers Sidney Moncrief and Jack Sikma had long departed the team.
Thus, the Bucks then became one of the most inefficient offenses over the early portion of the decade.
It seemed as if the tide turned their way after they had won the 1994 NBA Draft Lottery. And it was a draft loaded with potential at the top of the board. Glenn Robinson, Jason Kidd and Grant Hill were the clear top three talents in the draft. The Bucks front office had a franchise-altering decision to make: go with the pure scorer (Robinson), on-ball playmaker (Kidd) or two-way talent (Hill).
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The projection was for the Bucks to take Robinson, who was coming off of a 30.3 points per game season in his junior season with Purdue and had won the Naismith Award for the year. But the Bucks scouted each of their options, which included setting up a pre-draft workout for Kidd.
“I do remember working out here [Milwaukee] for [Mike] Dunleavy and understanding that my dream was gonna come true and that I could end up in one of these spots,” Kidd said in 2016.
The Bucks decided to go with the best college basketball player from 1994 in Robinson while Kidd went second overall to the Dallas Mavericks.
Robinson spent eight quality seasons in Milwaukee, where he averaged 21.1 points per game and led the Bucks back to the playoffs over the late 1990s. While he was far from being tabbed as a bust, Robinson never became that high-octane scorer and knee injuries late in his career deteriorated the on-ball explosiveness he once had.
Had the Bucks selected Kidd, they likely would not have made much of a significant jump in the Eastern Conference standings. But taking into account that the team brought in Ray Allen a couple of years later, the two would have been a spectacle to watch with catch-and-shoot opportunities of plenty for Allen.