KYLE KUZMA SAT at his locker, still wearing his white and green No. 18 jersey with his feet soaking in two buckets of ice. The Milwaukee Bucks just lost to the Orlando Magic 111-109 after Damian Lillard missed a game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer. Lillard pulled up his chair at his locker beside Kuzma.
Until then, Kuzma’s arrival in Milwaukee had gone smoothly. The team had stormed out of the All-Star break, winning seven of eight, and Kuzma had joked that he had won more during this stretch than his entire tenure with the Washington Wizards.
Inside the locker room, Kuzma and Lillard sat together, breaking down what had gone right and wrong in the game. They also took time to get to know each other, a postgame session that has become common since they became teammates.
Kuzma had won a championship early in his career with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020, playing with LeBron James and Anthony Davis. And now, he had another chance to play alongside and learn from future Hall of Famers Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Kuzma’s postgame chats with Lillard have turned into dinners on the road. Meanwhile, on the Bucks’ team plane, Kuzma typically sits next to Antetokounmpo.
“The mental preparation, that really stands out the biggest,” Kuzma told ESPN. “What they do on a day-to-day basis and just how they lead, how they encourage people. They are all-time greats, but very calming, very encouraging for you to be your best self.”
The trade that brought Kuzma to Milwaukee marked a dramatic shift in team history and a continuing trend in a changing era for the franchise. The four-team deal Bucks general manager Jon Horst orchestrated before the trade deadline meant the team had to give up Khris Middleton, a franchise cornerstone.
Horst called trading Middleton after 11½ seasons with the franchise the toughest deal of his life, but he considered the deal not as a “Khris or Kyle comparison” even if he knew it was inevitable.
“It’s still the awesome responsibility to try to take this franchise and maximize the window that we have now,” Horst said a few days after the Feb. 6 trade deadline. “And win as best we can, what we think gives us the best chance to win.
“This isn’t a Khris or a Kyle comparison, although that’s the easy thing to do. It’s the team before the trade deadline and the team after the trade deadline.”
After two straight first-round playoff losses, the team responded by firing two coaches before hiring Doc Rivers, making a franchise-altering trade for Lillard and moving on from Middleton, an unceremonious end for a franchise icon.
Kuzma is averaging 33.6 minutes since joining the team and fits the profile of a player who could amplify the Bucks’ pace (they rank No. 8 this season; they were second in their championship season in 2020-2021), and help power the league’s second-ranked perimeter attack. Neither has happened — yet
Milwaukee’s run after the All-Star break preceded a three-game slide. But Kuzma and the Bucks have rebounded with back to back wins — including Saturday against the Indiana Pacers, who are Milwaukee’s closest challenger for the Eastern Conference’s No. 4 seed — entering Sunday’s home matchup with the Oklahoma City Thunder (9 p.m. ET, ESPN).
“I love the way he plays,” Antetokounmpo said last month. “He plays with high energy. He competes defensively. He takes that [toughest] matchup in the last final minutes. In the second unit, he’s aggressive and gets to his spots. … We need him to keep on being great.”
Horst said he assessed his roster before the deadline, and thought the Bucks with Kuzma gave them more opportunities to match up with the rest of the conference in the postseason. For a team charged with maximizing each season of Antetokounmpo’s prime, the Bucks made a move for a player they believe is more versatile and reliable.
The question is: Were they right?
THE PREVIOUS ERA of the Bucks had gone through an evolution for some time.
Milwaukee traded away Jrue Holiday to acquire Lillard 18 months ago, shifting the defense-focused identity that led the team to the 2021 NBA championship. A few months later, the Bucks fired first-year coach Adrian Griffin and replaced him with Rivers. This past offseason, the Bucks added Gary Trent Jr. and Taurean Prince to better complement their star duo.
Acquiring Kuzma was a continuation of Horst’s efforts to build the team around Antetokounmpo and Lillard.
“In Kyle, you have a skill set that will allow him to play a lot of different roles based on the matchup, based on who we’re playing, in the ways that Giannis and Dame need them,” Horst said.
“There’s a variety of ways in which he can fill different roles because of his versatility that makes our one and two even better.”
Middleton was the clear odd man out, even though he had been on the team since 2013-14, Antetokounmpo’s rookie season, and owns the franchise record for career 3-pointers and is the team’s third-leading scorer all time (behind Antetokounmpo and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.) Acquired as a G League player at the start of his career, Middleton rose to become a three-time NBA All-Star next to Antetokounmpo, co-starring as a key contributor in Milwaukee’s first title in 50 years.
But after the championship run, knee injuries affected Middleton’s availability. He sprained his MCL in the 2022 playoffs and missed 10 games. He missed the start of the following season while recovering from offseason wrist surgery, then missed an additional 18 straight games that season because of knee soreness. He missed 102 games in three seasons after the title run.
And this past offseason, Middleton had surgeries on both ankles, delaying the start of his season until December.
Milwaukee started the season 2-8, in part because the team needed to turn to young players such as Andre Jackson Jr. and AJ Green with Middleton sidelined. When Middleton returned, after the Bucks had won nine of their past 12 games to get back to .500, there was some frustration for Bucks players, team sources said, in trying to fit Middleton back into the starting lineup, which led to Middleton being brought off the bench. Middleton played more than 25 minutes in a game only twice after Jan. 11.
Horst called Middleton’s lack of availability in recent seasons a minimal factor in the trade, but the fact that he did the deal signaled otherwise, according to Middleton.
“They’re in a win-now situation. They don’t have time for guys missing a game or two to nurse injuries or get back right,” Middleton told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after the trade. “They’re in the race. There’s no cushion where you can take games like we have in the past. Everybody needs to be out there. I have to understand that.
“I tried to be out there as much as I could. Sometimes, it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. I can’t control that. So, I’m not going to be upset with that, I’m not going to be upset with them about anything about that. That’s just the way life goes sometimes.”
The Bucks tried to find chemistry among Antetokounmpo, Lillard and Middleton, but injuries never gave them much chance to do so. They played 197 minutes together over 18 games this season. After the All-Star break last year, they were limited to just 105 minutes over five games.
“It was a pretty realistic view on this group: When healthy, as constructed, I thought the group could compete with anyone,” Horst said. “I think that Kyle gives us more chances to compete with more different teams at different matchups.”
The trade also brought the Bucks under the salary cap’s second apron, which gives Milwaukee more flexibility in the future. After the Bucks’ slow start this season, ESPN reported they called teams about trades by the first week of November. But most of the moves they wanted to make were impossible, restricted by the CBA.
“We believe that this gives us a better chance to win this year,” Horst said. “It happens to also put us under the second apron, which gives us some benefits going forward, there’s no question. We will hopefully maximize those benefits, but that wasn’t the intent.”
IN THE BEGINNING of the second quarter this past Thursday night against the Los Angeles Lakers, Kuzma defended new Lakers star Luka Doncic.
With LeBron James out of the lineup, Doncic was the Lakers’ primary scoring option, the kind of matchup Kuzma has happily accepted since coming to Milwaukee.
Doncic finished the game with 45 points, but when matched up with Kuzma, the 6-foot-9 forward held his own, limiting the Lakers star to 1-of-6 from the floor as the closest defender, according to Second Spectrum. Milwaukee extended what was only a four-point lead after the first quarter and won the game comfortably 126-106.
“He’s a guy that embraces it,” Lillard said after the game. “I’ve heard him on other nights where Giannis might be guarding somebody — [Pascal] Siakam or whatever the matchup might be — and [Kuzma] will be running down and court, like, ‘Let me take him.’ He’ll point Giannis to somebody else to kind of like, ‘We don’t want you having to work and chase this dude around. I’m going to take him.’
“He’s come here with the mentality of, ‘Plug me in wherever I can help the team.'”
Milwaukee’s defense has improved since Kuzma’s arrival. Since the trade, the team has ranked sixth in defense. The Bucks were 11th prior to the trade.
But he has struggled in two areas the Bucks believe he can help the team: in transition and with his lineup versatility.
A season ago, Kuzma made the third-most shots (147) in transition in the NBA, with a 72% effective field goal percentage, the fourth best in the league. However, since his debut for Milwaukee, Kuzma has recorded a 41% effective field goal mark, the worst in the NBA during that span, per Second Spectrum.
The Bucks also could play Kuzma in the frontcourt next to Antetokounmpo at center. But so far, Rivers has been reluctant to utilize those lineups. This season, they have played nine minutes when Kuzma and Antetokounmpo are both on and Brook Lopez and Jericho Sims are off.
Rivers said he isn’t concerned about the early ups and downs.
“If you watch people, you track people when they first join a team, they look great at first,” Rivers said after Thursday’s game. “Then they get caught in that hesitant zone, trying to figure out when [to be] aggressive. It felt like tonight, every time he did something, he was in the way. Wrong way. That’s how the game felt watching it. But we will just keep watching tape and it’ll work itself out, I guarantee you.”
It’s part of the reason Lillard has tried to make Kuzma’s introduction to the team as smooth as possible. One of his messages: Don’t feel like you need to wait for us to get out and run.
“If it’s the right play,” Lillard said, “then make it.”
A year ago at the trade deadline, Kuzma had an opportunity to be dealt from Washington to the Dallas Mavericks, a trade he vetoed when the team asked his opinion. The timing of it was off, and he thought he could be a part of building something with the Wizards. But when the opportunity arrived again this year, Kuzma was ecstatic.
“I figure I was right,” Kuzma said with a smirk, referencing the situation in Dallas. “It just felt like I had a clear, definite situation here to really impact and be available for this team. So far, so good.”
