Damian Lillard's tenure as a star almost certainly fell apart when his left Achilles tendon did in late April. Now his tenure as a Milwaukee Buck is over, too. The team announced Tuesday that it will waive Lillard and stretch the remaining $113 million on his contract over the next five years, thus concluding the oddly unsatisfying Giannis-Dame era.
On paper, it was a perfect fit; on the court, it never cohered. Lillard will receive all that money he's due without having to play another basketball game. Surely he wants to play more, however. He also turns 35 in two weeks, and will be 36 by the time he's ready to log serious minutes again, on a repaired tendon, as a 6-foot-2 guard already toeing the line of athletic viability.
That all sounds pretty dire to me, and to anyone else that has enjoyed watching Lillard become one of the greatest point guards of his generation. But Sam Amick of The Athletic reports that Lillard is "elated" to become a free agent. He was reportedly already looking for a way out of Milwaukee before his injury, and this move allows him to sign a dirt-cheap deal with another team. Who knows what a post-recovery Lillard will even look like on the floor, but he'll at least get to select his destination, either this summer or the next. Perhaps it's just a feel-good retirement tour back in Portland.
It would appear that the Bucks are trying to convince Giannis Antetokounmpo to stay put. The franchise player has always applied pressure on the front office to shore up the roster, and they have always acquiesced, even when it meant trading away enormous chunks of their future. (They will not control their own first-round draft pick until 2031.) Waiving Lillard will give them some more room to tinker this offseason. To replace the shooting and rim protection of Brook Lopez, who was crucial to their past success but has since aged out of usefulness, the Bucks signed Myles Turner to a surprisingly cheap four-year, $107 million contract. Turner has been at the center of hypothetical trades for years, and he lands in the most schematically sensible destination. To maximize Giannis's downhill offense, the Bucks will need a center like Turner to open up the floor.
A floor-spacing 5 might be the only persistent aspect of the Bucks' identity from their title-contending era to whatever lies ahead. Everything else is in flux. When they were trotting out Lillard, Lopez, and Khris Middleton, the Bucks were one of the oldest and least athletic teams in the league. They're finally getting much younger, though that isn't necessarily a good thing. Antetokounmpo, who is still an MVP-caliber player, will be soldiering on with the likes of Kevin Porter Jr. and Kyle Kuzma in the starting lineup. On Monday, they re-signed Gary Trent Jr. to juice their three-point shooting. There are probably still a few more moves to make, but zooming out, the Bucks will be attempting to rebuild a team good enough for Antetokounmpo with over $20 million in Lillard's dead salary on their books for each of the next five seasons. In an already tight cap environment, that might spell doom. Or maybe, in this strange and battered Eastern Conference, Milwaukee can still go out and grab the No. 5 seed.
