The Milwaukee Bucks are going to have a hilarious roster next season. Tyler Herro! Myles Turner! Kevin Porter Jr.! Caris LeVert! Kyle fuckin' Kuzma! To assemble this Jaywalkers' Row of contributors, while also affording all of the non-corporeal essence of Damian Lillard that can be purchased with $22 million, takes some serious finagling. So much finagling, apparently, that it draws the concerned attention of the league's front office: According to a report from ESPN's Shams Charania, the Bucks are currently being investigated by the NBA for bizarre spending behavior.
At issue is the deal made between the Bucks and free-agent guard Gary Trent Jr., who over the weekend agreed to a new four-year contract worth $64 million. Just in math terms, there is nothing extreme about the deal. The veteran minimum for a player who, like Trent, has played eight seasons in the NBA, is about $6.7 million. The maximum, for which Trent is not eligible, is more than $57 million. The non-taxpayer mid-level exception for the upcoming season—a carve-out for teams over the salary cap but under the luxury tax threshold, like the Bucks—is right about $16 million. Trent's new contract escalates season by season, and for the upcoming season will pay him a little over $14 million, per Spotrac. In NBA terms, a $16 million annual salary is not an eye-popping commitment.
But in Gary Trent Jr. terms, a $16 million annual salary is, uhh, quite a lot. Meaning no more than the usual disrespect, Trent is just a guy, a streaky if hyper-willing shooter who does precisely nothing else of consequence on an NBA floor. He has played two seasons with the Bucks, and over that span was broadly awful. Last season he averaged 8.1 points per game, mostly as a reserve, and the Bucks were hopelessly overmatched during his minutes, worse by net rating by more than nine points per 100 possessions. The Bucks were hoping that Trent could keep them spaced and firing around Giannis Antetokounmpo, but Antetokounmpo's injuries plus the team's rapidly souring vibes ruined each of Milwaukee's last two campaigns, and now Giannis is in Miami and the team is a shambles.
You would not expect a team getting out of the Antetokounmpo business to bother spending $64 million on what is almost certainly the final third of the career of Gary Trent Jr. The decision to lavish a long-term deal on a ho-hum seventh man is made all the more curious by history: Trent joined the Bucks in 2024 on a veteran minimum contract worth just over $2 million, a striking pay cut for an in-his-prime veteran who'd just played out a three-year deal with an average annual salary of more than $17 million. Probably there were those who thought this was an appropriate correction for someone who tends to drive his team's fans absolutely crazy. Trent broadly overperformed his meager salary, posting 11 points per game that regular season as a heavy-use third guard, albeit for a deeply frustrating disappointment of a Bucks squad. Instead of cashing in with a bigger deal in free agency, Trent reupped with the Bucks on another near-minimum deal, this time a two-year contract with a player option on the second one.
The Bucks were awful last season, Trent was much worse, and the team subsequently dealt away the greatest player in franchise history, definitively closing their period of near-contention. Why all of a sudden do the Bucks consider this skittering gunner approximately five times as valuable as he was to a would-be contender? That is the question being asked by the NBA's investigators. Of course, everyone knows the answer, or at least shares the same impression: Trent's below-market deals for his first two years in Milwaukee were a favor to help fortify an otherwise cash-strapped franchise making a desperate push into contention during the suddenly numbered Days of Giannis. And Trent's new, hilariously above-market long-term deal is the Bucks returning that favor. The NBA has a word for that, and it is circumvention: Trent in effect was given a six-year, $70 million contract, split up into two minimum deals and one mid-level exception.
You have to hand it to the Bucks, who are so incredibly clever that they have outsmarted even themselves: They squeezed a replacement-grade bench guy onto one of the era's least enjoyable squads, won nothing, and now for their hard work they get four years of gilded Gary Trent Jr. on a team going absolutely nowhere. The NBA should drop the investigation immediately—that plus Kyle Kuzma is punishment enough. Unless the Bucks really want $64 million worth of Gary Trent Jr., in which case someone should stage an intervention.
