Milwaukee Bucks 2022 Trade Deadline Primer

Looking for some insight on how the NBA’s trade rules work? We’ve got you covered.

The NBA trade deadline is less than one month away, which means trade rumors and buzz are heating up in a big way. Despite the Milwaukee Bucks being reigning champions, fans rightfully want the team to explore every possible avenue of improving the roster. Unfortunately for them, this deadline is set up to be very quiet for the Bucks. And not just because Milwaukee is unlikely to have much interest in rocking the boat of their contending squad.

The real reason why has to do with the league’s rules on trades. There are a lot of them – Larry Coon’s CBA FAQ is a great resource, if a dense one – but the most important from the Bucks’ perspective is salary matching.

Salary Matching

NBA teams cannot just trade for any players they want, even if they have all of the draft picks in the world. The league has a complex salary cap system designed to prevent teams in big markets from “buying” championships. While teams like the Golden State Warriors are still running up big tax bills and effectively trying to do just that, they have to jump through a lot of hoops to do so.

The biggest of them when it comes to trades is the aforementioned salary matching, which gets more difficult to deal with the more a team is currently spending. Teams under the cap can essentially take on as much salary as they want, as long as they stay under the cap, and not even worry about matching. The Bucks are far from that situation though: with roughly $157 million currently on the books, they’re also significantly over the tax.

Tax teams are more restricted than teams over the cap but not yet in the tax (there’s actually a lot of room between the two, which is where most teams operate any given season). Here’s a direct quote from the CBA FAQ on what that restriction actually is:

“Taxpaying teams can take back up to 125% of their outgoing salaries, plus $100,000, no matter how much salary the team is sending away. For example, a taxpaying team trading away $10 million in salaries can acquire one or more replacement players making up to $12.6 million.”

This rule is the most important thing to consider when looking at Milwaukee’s trade deadline options. Forget if they have enough assets for a given team to send over their player (which is also a concern we’ll get to in a bit), the Bucks literally cannot take back most proven players without breaking up their championship core.

Let’s use Harrison Barnes as an example here, as some Bucks fans have been interested in him to fill a hole at power forward. We know the Sacramento Kings had interest in Donte DiVincenzo previously, so why not send him out for Barnes?

Because Barnes is too expensive, is why. At $20.2 million this season, the Bucks need to send out about $19 million in salary to take back Barnes. Looking at the team’s player contracts currently on the books illustrates why it’s hard to make trades: the only players making at least $19 million are Jrue Holiday, Khris Middleton, and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Outside of those three, the only player making more than $10 million is Brook Lopez, at $13.3 million. The next-highest salary is Pat Connaughton, who makes just $5.3 million this season.

To get Barnes, the Bucks would either have to trade one of their big three (not happening), or Brook Lopez AND Pat Connaughton, or Brook Lopez, Donte DiVincenzo, AND another player. That’s a lot of rotation pieces to give up! And, as a confounding factor, two of the three players mentioned there are in very weird spots trade-wise.

Player Trade Values

Trading Brook Lopez right now is a catch-22 – if the Bucks believe he’s going to be healthy by the postseason, they wouldn’t want to trade him. That should be obvious to anybody who watched the last playoff run.

Thus, if you’re a rival team and the Bucks call and offer Lopez as he recovers from his back surgery, knowing that Milwaukee would want him around if the prognosis is good, why would you want to trade for him? The short answer is you wouldn’t.

It’s hard to imagine the Bucks getting any real value for Brook right now because of his situation, which means he is essentially just salary filler in a trade, and since he’s owed more money next year, teams may actually view him as a negative asset. Attaching additional assets to move Brook would be a very tough pill to swallow for Bucks fans mere months after his integral role in winning the freaking championship, so it’s hard to imagine many deals involving him.

While less complex, the Donte DiVincenzo situation has similar red flags for other teams given his injury history. Donte is playing now though, and is more likely to be traded for that season alone. Most of the other players on the Bucks roster, with one notable exception, are simply more valuable to the Bucks than they are to other teams.

What player making roughly $5 million would Milwaukee want back for Pat Connaughton? The only real examples are standout players on rookie deals, and why would their teams want to give up a prospect for Pat, who hits free agency after the season?

The Young Core

The exception mentioned earlier is, of course, Jordan Nwora, who is just 23 years old and has already demonstrated his dynamic shotmaking at the NBA level. Nwora is the one player who a rebuilding team would have real interest in, outside of maybe Donte, to see if he can do more with more consistent playing time than he will get on the healthy version of the Bucks.

That’s great, we’ve found our trade assets! But before you get too excited, now we need to loop back to our earlier conversation about salary matching. Donte DiVincenzo makes $4.6 million this year, and Jordan Nwora is at $1.5 million. That’s $6.1 million or so combined, which means the Bucks could take back a little less than $8 million if they’re trading both DiVincenzo and Nwora.

That is a very small amount of money by NBA standards – 163 players are making more than Milwaukee could take back for those two. To make matters worse, many of the players making less are promising young players still on their rookie scale contracts – it seems unlikely that DiVincenzo and Nwora would be enough to secure De’Andre Hunter, Scottie Barnes, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Darius Garland, even if the finances on the deal work.

Even if teams out there are especially high on one or both of those two, both players are on expiring contracts. Any team acquiring Donte or Nwora will be able to retain them in free agency, as they’ll be restricted free agents, but they’ll become significantly more expensive players if they do show real promise in expanded roles for the rest of the season. Also, a rebuilding team who is high on either player could simply wait, hold onto all of their players, and then offer DiVincenzo or Nwora a contract this summer in hopes the Bucks won’t want to match. Any team under the tax would be paying less for those players than Milwaukee would because of the luxury tax implication of signing them.

Final Thoughts

For all of the reasons laid out here, I find it unlikely that the Bucks trade for anybody who will get the typical fan all that excited. My personal favorite deal is still Kenrich Williams for some mix of Jordan Nwora, other guys on minimum deals (especially Semi Ojeleye), and a couple second round picks. It feels likely that if Milwaukee does make a deal, it’s for a player like Williams who is on a very small cap hit this season.

If you’re committed to finding the big move the Bucks can make, though, here is some guidance for your fake trade creation:

The Bucks don’t have a first round pick they can currently trade. They owe their 2023, 2025, and 2027 picks outright to New Orleans, and the Pelicans can opt to swap picks in 2024 and 2026. Due to the Stepien rule that limits teams from sending their firsts in consecutive years, that means the picks unaccounted for (in 2022 and 2028) cannot be traded, nor can picks too far from now (I believe it’s only the next seven drafts that are trade eligible).

The Bucks have five second round picks currently available, by my count: their own second rounders in 2023, 2024, 2027, and 2028, and the Indiana Pacers 2025 second round pick. The others were traded away or taken by Adam Silver. We’ve seen Jon Horst work magic with these before, so I would expect some to be involved in any deal that does happen.

Finally, here are the maximum salaries the Bucks can take back for various player packages (as per Fanspo). But first, three notes:

1. These are NOT the salaries of these players, but the max that could be taken back for them in a trade.

2. Grayson Allen not included here because he is nearly untradeable, as his extension was high enough for the poison pill provision to kick in — basically he barely counts as any salary from the Bucks’ perspective, but for a bigger amount on the other side, further complicating salary matching.

3. One final caveat here is that trading several players for one mid-season is very hard to pull off, especially for the already short-handed Bucks, and would increase the luxury tax bill significantly if open roster spots had to be filled in addition to adding any salary in the trade itself.

• Jordan Nwora - $1.9 million

• Semi Ojeleye - $2.3 million

• Rodney Hood - $2.8 million

• Nwora and Ojeleye - $4.2 million

• George Hill - $5.1 million

• Donte DiVincenzo - $5.9 million

• Hill and Nwora - $6.9 million

• DiVincenzo and Hill - $10.9 million

• Brook Lopez - $16.7 million

• Lopez, DiVincenzo, and Ojeleye - $24.8 million

• Lopez, DiVincenzo, and Hill - $27.5 million

• Lopez, DiVincenzo, and Connaughton - $29.2 million