Middleton/Johnson to Wash for Kuzma/Baldwin

[buckboy]

NM

[ajb905]

two things can be true...Bucks could not rely on Khris anymore and also that they traded for a TURRIBLE player in Kuzma to get out from under the 2nd apron.

Horst love of player options made moving PatC more costly. Lot of teams have been dumping expiring contracts for 2nd rounders

[Mags FTW]

Read on Twitter

?s=46

[Turk Nowitzki]

So, we still have our 2031 first? We didn't swap that, too?

That pick is about to get sent out for DeRozan.

That would have in me in here posting like JayMKE

[jakecronus8]

Can someone explain how we are better? Lets say Middleton could only play 25-28 mpg in the playoffs. He's still an efficient scorer, floor spacer, and a very good passer. Are people expecting that Kuzma is all off a sudden going to shoot a career high from 3 here? I just don't get it. Stop looking at PPG.

If Midds plays 25-28 mins in the playoffs he won't last more than 2 games.

That’s **** bull and this trade is worse than we traded Ray Allen

Might be good to log off for awhile. What a silly statement

[buckboy]

Until the trade deadline passes, I'm going to convince myself we're turning Kuzma around and won't be stuck with him.

He gave up part of his trade kicker to get them under the 2nd apron.

They're not trading him.

[jakecronus8]

He mentioned how it hurts when guys leave and mentioned it will hurt when Bobby, Pat and Brook are gone too. Probably just meant in general, but maybe something else is cooking.

Watch on YouTube

Doesn’t mention or allude to himself ever leaving.

[-Jragon-]

Way worse than Tobes trade

Tobes dudes should be happy... Kuzma is Tobes, we got him back

[MissKhriddleton]

You can’t teach 6’9”.

[DanoMac]

Imagine two years ago trading Middleton for Kuz lmao. This franchise is cooked

Two years ago Middleton was an asset

[nagawicka]

Why did we have to give up AJ Johnson? I wasn't sold on him but still seems like giving up a young asset for nothing.

Guessing we had to give up AJ to convince Washington to make it a 2031 pick swap instead of just giving them the 2031 pick outright.

Giving up TWO #1s is better than throwing away AJ Johnson, HE ****' panned OUT!

[Ron Swanson]

I'll defend the trade in this sense and this sense only. Saying they're "punting" the season is weird. Punting the season would have been keeping Khris and through nothing but naive, blind faith, thinking his body was gonna magically hold up for a long playoff campaign. That simply wasn't an option anymore.

[M-C-G]

Again guys, Midds must not have had any value and the cost to getting under the apron and getting out of his 34M opt in was AJJ and a first swap unlikely to be swapped. I think the hurt is us reconciling how washed Middleton is and how much that next year contract is an anchor. Not a fan of the deal, but I think some of the reactions are way too over the top.

We just traded our second least athletic player for an athletic player on a team full of dinosaurs. If we can move Lopez in a deal, we instantly become 10x more athletic which is one of our biggest issues.

[-Jragon-]

Losing Midds is addition by subtraction. Trade Pat and 1 more slow dude to Doc proof the roster.

[buckboy]

Can someone put together a list of all John Horst moves and we decide as a collective if he’s terrible at his job or not?

https://www.basketball-reference.com/executives/horstjo01x.html

Spoiler: It ain't great.

[JonHeist]

I blame KD for breaking Khris' ankles

we wouldn't have had to do this otherwise

[Packbuckman]

If Midds plays 25-28 mins in the playoffs he won't last more than 2 games.

That’s **** bull and this trade is worse than we traded Ray Allen

Might be good to log off for awhile. What a silly statement

Really Kuzma sucks as a player nobody but us are trading for him and we gave up our 1st rd pick this yr besides Middleton who is a player even after getting both ankles surgery on. Payton at least use to be a great player something Kuzma never will be.

[Neuromancer56]

Are we sure that Doc didn't force Horst to do this deal?

[machu46]

I’m coming around on the “if there’s a follow up that makes sense” and “Khris is completely washed physically”, this may not be the awful trade it appeared at first glance.

I'm already on board with the latter, and I guess I can be convinced if we come through big with the former.

I just can't believe this is what we had to do to get under the apron. I'm not a big AJJ fan, or particularly care about our pick-swap-swap, but the fact that we were the ones giving up assets to facilitate this is just mindboggling to me. We had no leverage, I guess.

My only thought is that the Wiz were keenly aware of that and know that they were ultimately facilitating us making a bigger trade.

Like I said earlier today, and again, can't stress enough that I'm not really agreeing with the move, but Washington had zero reason to do a straight swap of Middleton and Kuzma. Decent chance Middleton opts into his player option, thus costing more money over his contract than Kuzma does and Washington has no reason to want Middleton as a player. So it makes sense that we needed to incentivize them to do the swap. We can obviously argue over how much incentivization it should have required, but I'm guessing it was basically deciding between AJ Johnson or the 2031 1st round pick and we opted to include AJ. Again, doesn't mean we should have made this trade, but clearly we wanted to get Kuzma.

Can someone explain how we are better? Lets say Middleton could only play 25-28 mpg in the playoffs. He's still an efficient scorer, floor spacer, and a very good passer. Are people expecting that Kuzma is all off a sudden going to shoot a career high from 3 here? I just don't get it. Stop looking at PPG.

I don't know about career high, but I certainly expect him to improve on this year's numbers by a decent amount. This season has been an outlier year for Kuzma, especially at the FT line where he's shot 10-15% worse than his usual. He will pretty much by default have better shot quality here than he did in Washington since he won't be dealing with anyone's best defender anymore, will have actual offensive threats next to him, etc. Having said that, even if he gets to career high efficiency, it's still not great efficiency lol. The absolute best case scenario here is that in a smaller role, he'll be able to exert more effort on defense and do more of the off-ball cutting and stuff that he used to do. At the same time, you hope he'll be a credible shooting threat (not asking for a ton here, but getting back to 34-35% would be fine) while also being able to attack mismatches/create shots when he's playing with bench units. Basically banking on him being a more helpful defender/rebounder than 2025 Middleton to offset the drop off offensively (and ya know...hopefully another move coming that further improves the team).

Can someone explain how we are better? Lets say Middleton could only play 25-28 mpg in the playoffs. He's still an efficient scorer, floor spacer, and a very good passer. Are people expecting that Kuzma is all off a sudden going to shoot a career high from 3 here? I just don't get it. Stop looking at PPG.

I guess the thought is Kuzma is shooting terribly from deep, shooting a Giannis like percentage the line, and playing zero defense because he cares so much about winning

Guy praised himself for being selfish and getting his a month or so ago

People really take these sorts of quotes way too seriously. It's not really any different from what Dame said the other day about how Vin Baker told him to stop worrying about doing the right thing and just go out there and be you. Obviously Dame is a much better player so it makes more sense coming from him, but I think Kuzma was just basically saying that it's easy to get in your own head and overthink things when you're being told to focus on helping develop the young guys and what not and he was just trying to go back to playing basketball more instinctually, which is a totally fine mindset to have. The issue of course is that as the #1 or #2 offensive guy for the Wizards, Kuzma simply is not good enough to succeed doing that.

At any rate, I'm going to let Kuzma play like an idiot in a Bucks uniform before I totally write it off as a disaster.

[M-C-G]

I'll defend the trade in this sense and this sense only. Saying they're "punting" the season is weird. Punting the season would have been keeping Khris and through nothing but naive, blind faith, thinking his body was gonna magically hold up for a long playoff campaign. That simply wasn't an option anymore.

The goal may be ‘different is better’ at this point. Some kind of Bobby/Lopez/Pat deal that gets us athletic 5 and we have transformed the teams biggest weakness but who the hell knows what is going to happen (hope something big)