What becomes of Damian Lillard if Giannis Antetokounmpo's future with Bucks is in doubt?

On Thursday, CBS Sports' Bill Reiter reported that if things continue to go badly for the Milwaukee Bucks, there is "growing confidence across the NBA" that Giannis Antetokounmpo could become available through a trade. Since that story ran, the Bucks have lost a 122-99 game to a Memphis Grizzlies team missing two starters and six rotation players in total. That makes four consecutive double-digit Bucks losses. Two of them came against expected lottery opponents in the Nets and Bulls. They rank 24th in both offense and defense through five games. Their age, injury and defensive woes have only carried over from a season ago. Whether sooner or later, it is becoming increasingly clear that Milwaukee no longer gives Antetokounmpo his best chance to win.

It's a reality that Bucks fans haven't wanted to hear, but it's one Antetokounmpo himself has hinted at plenty himself. In an interview with Tania Ganguli of the New York Times in September of 2023, he made his priorities clear. He may want to remain a Buck, "but at the end of the day, being a winner, it's over that goal," he said. "Winning a championship comes first. I don't want to be 20 years on the same team and don't win another championship."

The possibility of a future trade request is pretty evident within that quote, but there's a notable subtext here that applies to Milwaukee's broader problems. Whether he gets traded or not, it's ultimately his choice. Antetokounmpo is good enough and young enough that he more or less controls his future. If he wants to get traded, he can probably make that happen. If he wants to go somewhere specific, he can probably make that happen too. No team is going to pass on the chance to add a two-time MVP in his prime. The ball is almost entirely in his court.

The same can mostly be said of those he'd be leaving behind in Milwaukee. Antetokounmpo has four remaining teammates from his 2021 championship: Brook Lopez, Khris Middleton, Bobby Portis and Pat Connaughton. All three have the capacity to become free agents in 2025, either through expiring contracts or player options. If the holdovers from the good times want to go their separate ways, they can do so this summer. That would leave only one eight-figure salary left on the team, and it belongs to the player with the least control in any of this: Damian Lillard.

There's a sad irony to all of this. Lillard was the logo for NBA loyalty for years as he toiled away on mediocre Portland teams. He spent more than a decade watching his contemporaries successfully exert the sort of control Antetokounmpo now has, forcing moves to preferred destinations and winning big as a result. When the time finally came for him to do so in 2023, he wasn't granted the same privilege. He made it clear he wanted to join the Miami Heat. The Trail Blazers didn't listen and made him a Buck. Now the team he didn't want to join is on the verge of collapsing around him, and if it does, well, he might be stuck.

Lillard tried to artificially restrict his market in 2023. It's happening organically now for a variety of reasons. The NBA's ultra-restrictive aprons have scared teams off of stars far younger, and Lillard is owed super-max money through the end of the 2026-27 season. The league as a whole is drifting away from his archetype. The best teams in the NBA right now are the Celtics and Thunder, who have defensive aces at virtually every position. Lillard barely got by defensively at his best. He's worse today, and given his size, he's not as easy to hide or find uses for as players like Luka Doncic or James Harden. You can live with small defenders. You can live with bad defenders. It is really, really hard to survive with defenders who are both bad and small in today's league. There's a reason nobody seemed all that interested in Trae Young last summer.

All of this would be forgivable if Damian Lillard was still, well, Damian Lillard. Nobody would blink at paying Jalen Brunson super-max money. But Lillard is 34, and you don't need to look hard to find evidence of decline.

The raw points were still coming before Thursday's four-point disaster against the Grizzlies, but they were a bit misleading. Lillard scored 112 points in his first four games, but 36 of them came at the foul line. That's roughly 34% of his points coming off of free throws compared to around 23% for his career. Whistles can dry up pretty quickly. Last season, Lillard averaged 25.1 points per game between October and January, but needed eight free-throw attempts per game to get there. From February on, he lost around 30% of those free-throw attempts. Sure enough, his scoring declined.

Lillard isn't going to continue hitting only 25% of his pull-up 3's, but he hit just 32.3% of them a year ago. At his peak he was routinely in the high 30s or 40s, but he hasn't reached 37% since 2021. These are high degree of difficulty shots, of course, but the theory of paying Lillard super-max money is pretty reliant on him making them at a reasonably high clip. The best version of Lillard tortured opposing defenses by forcing them to put two defenders on the ball in pick-and-roll far away from the basket, creating advantages for everyone else on his teams. Opponents don't need to defend him as aggressively if the pull-up 3's aren't falling.

Lillard's drive volume hasn't exactly cratered, but it's falling too. It peaked at 15.2 per game. He's down to 10.5. A lot of that is team-related. Milwaukee's offense doesn't run through Lillard to nearly the same extent that Portland's did, but how much value can you really extract out of Lillard when that is the case? The offensive volume threshold he needs to reach to justify his defense and salary is extremely high, but because the Bucks run through Antetokounmpo, he has a much harder time crossing it.

This would be easier if Lillard and Antetokounmpo interacted offensively in the ways we expected them to. They just never quite figured out their pick-and-roll dance. Some nights it's there. Lillard made four shots out of pick-and-roll against Boston, for instance, and all four came with Antetokounmpo as his screener. But by and large, he's proven more comfortable working with Brook Lopez, an effective partnership but a suboptimal one. The theory of Lillard and Antetokounmpo running a two-man game together was that it not only engaged both in the primary action and forced defenses to make difficult decisions about how to guard them, but it also allowed Lopez to space the floor for them. Antetokounmpo isn't nearly as useful out of the play. That's not to say he's ignored in the way most non-shooters are, but he still very much is a non-shooter, and that creates spacing complications.

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Most players with Antetokounmpo's physical dimensions (though there aren't many of them!) spend their formative years learning the intricacies of pick-and-roll screening. Knowing when to dive and when to short-roll. Identifying vulnerabilities in coverages to hit as a passer. Milwaukee's roster was just never designed for him to do that as much as a typical big man because he generally had the ball. When he did screen, it was most often late in games for Khris Middleton, who doesn't navigate the floor and create advantages like a small guard does. Antetokounmpo is struggling to adjust to Lillard mostly because he never had anyone remotely like Lillard to do these things with. That's not to say he can't figure it out. Doc Rivers has invested quite a bit of offensive energy into doing so. But for now, these are still two players most comfortable doing their own thing rather than amplifying one another.

Would Lillard be better on a more traditional team? Well, maybe, but there are always tradeoffs. Most traditional pick-and-roll big men already have their high-usage guard, or they don't have Milwaukee's spacing, or their salary sheets can't absorb him.

Miami is the obvious starting point. Pat Riley might be interested in landing him at a discount on principle alone. But the Heat have already invested draft capital into Terry Rozier. Jimmy Butler is 35 and not exactly thriving to start this season himself. Does Miami really want to go all-in on two older players when there's more than enough youth here to pivot into whatever comes next? As a reminder: both the Heat and Bucks are above the first apron. For practical purposes, that means they can't trade with one another without a third party eating a bit of salary for them. Good luck making all of the moving parts work during the season, with tighter roster restrictions and less cap space floating around.

The Timberwolves are a nearly perfect basketball fit, at least in as much as one can exist for him now. Rudy Gobert knows traditional pick-and-roll like the back of his hand. Anthony Edwards, Jaden McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker could protect him on the perimeter defensively. Spacing was Minnesota's biggest issue offensively a season ago, though increased volume from Edwards and the arrival of Donte DiVincenzo have helped. A Lillard-Edwards pairing would be nightmarish offensively.

It would also be financially nightmarish for a Timberwolves team in the middle of a possible sale. By all accounts, the potential incoming ownership group led by Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore isn't going to want to keep payroll at Minnesota's current level. Even if they did, the Timberwolves are out of picks. Would Milwaukee want to move Lillard badly enough in a post-Giannis scenario to take the shorter contracts owed to Mike Conley and Julius Randle? It's hard to imagine Rob Dillingham being on the table, given what they paid for him. It's just as hard to imagine Lore and Rodriguez paying Lillard's remaining salary. The Timberwolves are probably trimming, not spending.

Finding basketball fits only gets harder from here. How desperate is Denver for an offense injection? If they were going the "Michael Porter Jr. plus Zeke Nnaji for a scoring guard" route, would they rather have Lillard, or Zach LaVine, who is five years younger? Orlando is in the enviable position of needing a similar player but having much more flexibility to actually get one. They have all of their picks and a mountain of mid-sized salaries. Their best player is 21 and out for the next six weeks at least. They can afford to be choosier and wait out a younger target. The Clippers have an old, high-usage guard at home, and there's just no way to justify letting Paul George walk just to trade for Lillard.

What's so startling about all of this is that we've devoted very little ink to the sort of assets it might take to pry Lillard away from Milwaukee. This is less a matter of what it would take to get him and more a matter of how many teams would be eager to take him in Milwaukee's doomsday scenarios. It's not 2023 anymore. The cap has changed. The trade market has changed. Lillard has changed.

If this thing goes south and Antetokounmpo exerts his influence to jump off of the sinking ship, Lillard might have no choice but to go down with it. Right now, the only control he has in how he plays. Both his best bet and Milwaukee's are in figuring out how to make this work. If the first five games are any indication, both have a long way to go.

What becomes of Damian Lillard if Giannis Antetokounmpo's future with Bucks is in doubt?

What becomes of Damian Lillard if Giannis Antetokounmpo's future with Bucks is in doubt?

What becomes of Damian Lillard if Giannis Antetokounmpo's future with Bucks is in doubt?

What becomes of Damian Lillard if Giannis Antetokounmpo's future with Bucks is in doubt?

What becomes of Damian Lillard if Giannis Antetokounmpo's future with Bucks is in doubt?