The Milwaukee Bucks fired Doc Rivers on Monday. What a terrible time they have all had. The Bucks failed to advance out of the first round of the playoffs in two previous tries under Rivers; this season, beset by injuries to Giannis Antetokounmpo and showing that characteristic idealessness of a Rivers-coached team, they played to a miserable 32-win record, missed the play-in, wound up in a public fight with their best player, and entered recrimination season well before the close of their official one.
Rivers took the job in January 2024, in what looked at the time like a midseason coup d'état: The Bucks had hired Rivers to be an advisor to rookie head coach Adrian Griffin, but Griffin was fired after 43 games, despite coaching the Bucks to a record of 30–13. I cannot confidently accuse Rivers of having played the scheming vizier, but his time as head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers had ended months earlier with grinding frustration and apocalyptic vibes, and a side door might've been his only realistic route back into the big chair with a real-deal contender. In any case, as the prize for a few months of no official duties under general manager Jon Horst and Milwaukee's owners, Rivers found himself coaching in the All-Star game and helming a would-be championship contender.
It didn't work: Rivers coached that team to a 17–19 finish and an early playoff exit. The Bucks may have made a mistake in hiring an aging coach who was previously spending his time playing golf and mailing in appearances on Bill Simmons's podcast, but they stuck with their guy. The Bucks won 48 games and avoided the play-in last season, but Damian Lillard came down with deep vein thrombosis in late March, sat out the remainder of the regular season, played like shit for two games of a first-round playoff series, and then suffered a devastating Achilles injury that wiped out his 2025–26 season. In a move that will be rued for a generation by suffering Bucks fans, the team decided to use the NBA's stretch provision to waive Lillard, adding more than $22 million in dead salary to their annual payroll until the summer of 2030. Rivers and Horst flew to Greece ahead of this season in order to convince a skeptical Antetokounmpo that this was good business, that the team could compete by using savings from the maneuver to sign Myles Turner. That also has not worked.
This season's Bucks have only sucked ass. Without Giannis, they played to a record of 15–31, which is worse than you'd expect of a contender, but then the team's entire deal is built around their singular do-everything superstar. With Giannis, the Bucks went just 17–19, and took some shockingly brutal losses, and were booed at home, and booed back. They finished in the league's bottom 10 in both offensive and defensive rating.
Rivers has seen it all in his time, including a superstar player who forgot, almost literally, how to play the sport. When he was hired by the Bucks, his bosses and players talked up his experience. "He has that same past-player perspective that Griff had," noted Pat Connaughton, who at the time was a valuable rotation guy and floor-spacer for the Bucks. "But he’s been doing it a long time and he’s won a championship." In a best-case scenario, experience would manifest as ideas; wisdom is all fine and good, unless it is merely the wisdom to accept one's powerlessness, in which case it is not so different from lassitude. In any case, Rivers appears to have had very little to offer the Bucks beyond the mere fact of his having been around the block. When shit turned sour, Rivers reportedly called a team meeting and used the time to wave around his credentials:
Rivers, who won an NBA title as coach of the Celtics in 2008 and will be enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame later this year, started the meeting by imploring his players to look up his résumé, six people in the room told ESPN.
"I took teams to the playoffs and to the championship that weren't supposed to. I thought this was one of them," Rivers told players in the session. "Either you're with us or against us. If you're not playing hard, we're not playing you anymore.
"I know everything that goes on in this building."
The bizarre session apparently included video clips of recent on-court miscues by Bucks forward Kyle Kuzma, by way of justifying a recent benching. Lit by shit-hearted glee though I may be at this humbling of one of my least-favorite players, I am not surprised to learn that this bombed as a motivational tactic. Shams Charania reported that the meeting "rubbed large parts of the locker room the wrong way." That night, the Bucks scored a season-low 81 points in a 27-point wipe-out loss to the Boston Celtics, the third in a stretch of eight losses in nine games that effectively brought to a humiliating close the portion of the year where the team could dream of a turnaround.
Rivers has been at this for parts of 27 seasons. He has coached at least 10 regular-season games in every NBA season since he was 38 years old. He has been fired four times; another time he was traded to the Los Angeles Clippers for R.J. Hunter. He won a title in there, with the ubuntu Celtics, but his teams have otherwise been characterized by a tendency to flame out short of expectations, and by creeping dysfunction, and by his own professed bafflement at the cruelties of fate. Sometimes the bad luck is real. Often, though, a Rivers-coached team leaves you with the impression that it is less, and maybe even far less, than the sum of its parts. Whether that is fair or not, if he gets to own the good parts of his résumé—that championship, almost 1,200 regular-season wins, another 114 in the playoffs—then he has to wear the rest of it: His teams tend to disappoint; they tend to flub late-game scenarios; he tends to deflect public accountability; his exits tend to be ugly. This one is the ugliest yet. The Bucks are a disaster.
It does not seem likely that Rivers will get another head-coaching job. In news that should chill the blood of anyone offered an interview by his Milwaukee bosses, the Bucks are reportedly considering moving Rivers into "an advisory role" as they pay off the remaining year of salary on his contract. What he should do is retire. Certainly he has tasted everything that the NBA has to offer. It's hard to imagine that there's anyone left in the NBA who has not seen more than enough of him.
