Bucks should not prioritize getting their picks back in Giannis deal

There’s no telling if the Milwaukee Bucks will trade away Giannis Antetokounmpo before the trade deadline, or in the offseason, or at all. Recent reporting makes it sound possible Giannis could be moved, but his recent injury clouds the conversation.

All of that is a topic for a different article (or dozens of them, more accurately). This one is concerned with a specific piece of the broader Giannis trade conversation: that the Bucks should prioritize getting their original picks back from Portland, if possible, in a deal.

Just this week, Zach Lowe described the notion of Milwaukee getting the draft capital sent to Portland as part of the Damian Lillard trade as “the golden chip for the Bucks in any Giannis trade.”

As much as I respect Zach’s work and basketball acumen, I disagree.

It is true that the Bucks don’t control their own draft pick until 2031, and that situation is undoubtedly intimidating given it removes the best option for a small market team to rebuild. There’s no scenario where Milwaukee can take their lumps for the next few years and collect several top prospects through the draft as things stand today.

They do have some assurance that they’ll get a good pick this season, but that’s not the case from 2027-2030. While getting some of that control back would certainly be of value, it’s not necessarily better for Milwaukee than getting other assets the Bucks can use to rebuild their team. Especially since the concept of “their” picks doesn’t really exist anymore.

The Bucks sent three seasons of pick control to Portland: a 2028 pick swap, a 2029 first round pick, and a 2030 pick swap. On its face, there’s a problem with prioritizing those three assets in a Giannis deal: they are years down the road.

The Bucks still wouldn’t control their own pick in fully in 2026 or at all in 2027, meaning if the best assets in the return of a Giannis deal were the Bucks Portland picks, they wouldn’t be actually reaping any of those benefits until 2028. That’s a tough sell, to have the team basically exist in limbo for a pair of seasons until adding more talented young players.

Sorting through pick swap muck

The proposition is actually less appealing than it seems. Milwaukee included a second swap option on their 2028 first rounder as part of the Khris Middleton/Kyle Kuzma trade with the Wizards. Even if Portland relinquishes its swap rights on that pick, the Wiz can jump in and grab Milwaukee’s first in exchange for one coming via Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Phoenix, or Washington thanks to a convoluted multi-team pick swap situation.

So even in a scenario where the Bucks get everything back from the Blazers, they still don’t have full control of their pick in 2028. That means the golden chip is a 2029 first and a 2030 swap. But wait, there’s more!

With these pick swap situations, it's important to keep something in mind. A team can only trade what it has the rights to. This has been top of mind recently with the Bucks’ 2026 first, and the confusion that resulted when the Hawks traded for the Pelicans’ half of that swap. Questions have been asked regularly about whether the Bucks have a pick at all — did Atlanta acquire it?

Keeping in mind which team has the rights to what asset matters for this reason. The Bucks agreed to swap picks with the Pelicans when they acquired Jrue Holiday. Milwaukee left that trade with an asset: the worse half of that swap. It’s not their own pick outright, but it is something tangential the Bucks own. The Hawks can’t acquire that without the Bucks agreeing to give it up, so a two-team deal with the Pelicans and Hawks cannot affect the Bucks’ piece of that pick.

That crash course is worthwhile because the concept comes up again here. The Bucks 2029 first round pick is also tied up in a multi-team trade. Portland controlled its own first that year plus Milwaukee’s and Boston’s, and agreed to send the second-most favorable of those three to Washington as part of the Deni Avdija deal. The Wizards involvement here, again, means it’s not as simple as the Blazers sending the Bucks their first back.

Portland would have to agree to send the most and/or least favorable of their 2029 picks to Milwaukee, because that’s what they own now. The Blazers can’t simply send Milwaukee’s pick outright, because the Wizards have a claim to it depending on the order of those three teams’ picks in 2029.

That matters because agreeing to send the best of those picks could then leave Portland in a scenario where they wouldn’t control their own draft — a higher and more complicated price than just sending the Bucks their pick back.

Blissfully, the 2030 swap is actually as simple as it seems. The Blazers can swap picks with the Bucks if Milwaukee’s is better than Portland’s. Simple and not as complicated or costly for Portland to give up.

To sum it up, the Bucks getting “their” picks back from Portland would leave Milwaukee with the following three assets: a post-swap 2028 first with the Wizards controlling the pick and several other teams looped in, the best or worst of the Bucks/Celtics/Blazers 2029 first round pick (depending on what Portland agrees to send), and their own 2030 swap.

Even if Milwaukee got that 2029 best-of pick from the Blazers, that really only opens up two more opportunities to tank and get a top pick. And as the lottery has shown in recent years, even having the worst odds doesn’t guarantee you a premium player.

The lottery is a gamble in the NBA

The 2025 Draft Lottery featured none of the top four teams picking in their spots or better. From worst to fourth, the Jazz picked fifth, the Wizards picked sixth, the Hornets picked fourth, and the Pelicans picked seventh. The season prior saw the Wizards remain in their lottery spot of second, but the Pistons fell from first to fifth, the Hornets from third to sixth, and the Blazers from fourth to seventh.

The flattened lottery odds have introduced a randomness to the process that has plagued NBA bottom feeders since the change was made. The worst team in the league has just a 14% chance of picking first. It’s still good process in team-building to attain lottery picks and draft and develop players, but there’s no guarantee the best team at losing will be rewarded for it.

All of this is why the Bucks should not go out of their way to get their own picks back from the Blazers, either by sending Giannis to Portland directly to play with former teammates Dame and Jrue or via a multi-team trade.

If it works out that Portland is involved and the Bucks can get those picks as part of a package, that’s great. But getting salary filler and just those picks leaves Milwaukee with very little actual value: two more real shots at tanking, and none until 2029. A pair of literal lottery tickets with a 14% or worse chance of cashing as the top player in a given draft.

Getting young players or other picks in sooner drafts gives the Bucks a shot to develop a new core to compete in the East again and hopefully minimize the pain of not controlling their draft picks. Those picks are too far away, and too tied up in other deals, to be a safe enough bet at this point.