What would you do if you were the Milwaukee Bucks?At first glance, it seems an odd question. Things couldn't be better for Milwaukee and its first-year coach, Jason Kidd. He has vastly improved the team's defense and has them hunting a playoff berth.
The Bucks have already exceeded last season's 15 wins, which got them the second pick in the Lottery and rookie Jabari Parker. The team's new principal owners, Marc Lasry, Wes Edens and Jamie Dinan, are putting money and resources into the organization.
The Bucks are slowly creeping up in attendance, too. After finishing last season last in the league, drawing 13,487 per home game, they're averaging just less than 15,000 this season through 14 home dates, which is 27th overall. At 18-17, they're sixth in the East, which would currently get them an I-94/Route 41 first-round series with the Bulls.
And in a league where getting playoff experience is like finding gold, you can't tell a franchise that has three appearances in the last 10 seasons -- like Milwaukee -- not to take one when it becomes available. It's not Milwaukee's fault that the Indiana Pacers have been struck low by injuries, or that the Detroit Pistons started the season with a figurative foot in the bucket, or that the New York Knicks have imploded.
Right?
Except ...
The Bucks' stated goal, per their general manager, John Hammond, is to build a team capable of competing for a championship. And they're not close to having that kind of roster. They have two promising pieces in Parker, despite his ACL injury that ended his rookie season prematurely, and second-year swingman Giannis Antetokoumnpo. But that's hardly enough to compete with the East's best teams on a nightly basis, much less the West's behemoths.
And while the owners and Kidd hope to make Milwaukee a destination franchise, they're not there yet. Free agents of consequence do not yet have the Bucks on their short list.
The best way -- the only way -- for Milwaukee to add difference-making talent remains via the Draft. And right now, the Bucks are playing their way out of the Lottery, where most of the difference-making talent resides.
Despite shotblocker Larry Sanders being in and out of the lineup (he's missed the Bucks' last five games for undisclosed personal reasons), Kidd has Milwaukee playing top-10 defense. The Bucks are tied for fifth in defensive rating, allowing 100.6 points per 100 possessions, tied with Washington and better than Chicago, the Clippers, Toronto, Dallas and Cleveland.
The Bucks have gotten good at a couple of primary defensive concepts. They don't allow corner 3-pointers -- according to the indispensable basketball-reference.com, Milwaukee is 10th in the league in defending those shots, allowing opponents to shoot just 37.8 percent. And that is despite allowing the most 3-pointers as a percentage of opponents' overall three-point shots -- 29.7 percent of the Bucks' opponents' threes are corner threes.
So ... Milwaukee allows more corner threes as a percentage of threes taken by its opponents than any team in the league, yet is one of the best defensive teams in the league guarding the corner three. (By contrast, Dallas, a team that many consider a dangerous title contender, is dead last in the league in defending corner threes; opponents are shooting better than 46 percent on corner threes against the Mavericks. Many of those were certainly pre-Rondo corner threes, to be fair.)
Part of Milwaukee's success in guarding 3-pointers clearly is due to the Bucks' incredible length. Antetokoumnpo covers ground like Deion Sanders in his prime, and Parker has a significant wingspan as well.
But Kidd has been depending on his vets to win a lot of these games down the stretch. He's playing Jerryd Bayless, Jared Dudley and O.J. Mayo. Antetokoumnpo is still averaging the third-most minutes on the team (27.9 mpg) and only Brandon Knight averages better than 30 minutes a game (32.2).
Mind you; I'm not saying Kidd is wrong to try and win games. It's what coaches are hard-wired to do, because that's how they're judged. And the stench of losing is so hard to get off of a team once it's there. Bad habits become commonplace. Kidd and his assistants have done great work improving the Bucks.
But Kidd and his staff have to be feeling the heat of having to put a representative product on the court as well.
No other team in the league currently has as dire an arena situation as the Bucks, who have until 2017 to have an arena project under way to replace BMO Harris Bradley Center. As part of the sale agreement with Masry, Edens and Dinan, the NBA can buy the team back from its new owners in 2017 if there is no arena deal, presumably allowing out-of-town owners to be able to make bids on the team with the intention of moving it elsewhere.
Bucks president Peter Feigin told the Milwaukee Business Journal on Friday that an announcement for a site for the new arena could come by the end of January. He also said the team had two or three potential sites from which it would choose. In addition, it would detail financing plans for the arena. The team's preferred site is the current Journal Communications building downtown, which houses the offices and printing facilities of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel newspaper.
Masry and Edens have pledged at least $100 million toward construction of the building, which will likely run in excess of $450 million. Former owner Herb Kohl has also pledged $100 million. But the public financing piece has been difficult for Milwaukee city and county officials to sell. Counties surrounding Milwaukee have been adamant in their opposition to raising taxes to help finance the building.
A so-called "jock tax," income tax paid annually by visiting NBA players and other team employees who come through Wisconsin, is another potential source of revenue for a new building. The Journal-Sentinel reported last November that NBA teams contributed an estimated $10.7 million in jock taxes to the state in 2012, and siphoning that amount annually over 20 years from the state's coffers would provide up to $150 million in revenue for an arena without raising additional individual or corporate taxes on residents.
There's no right answer here, at least not from me. The Bucks have to win enough to find the dollars needed to get a new building, but they also have to develop and add more young players to the roster -- which likely ensures more losing. They can't go all the way down to the bottom like Philly and they can't count on being able to short-circuit the rebuild by overpaying for free agents, like teams in bigger markets.
It's either the start of something big, or fool's gold. And it's hard to see which one is real and which one is the mirage.
