Bobby Portis didn’t just leave Milwaukee with a new team. He left after living through the kind of season that can wear on everybody in a locker room.
Now with the Miami Heat after the June trade that also sent Giannis Antetokounmpo to Miami, Portis said the change has felt like a reset after six seasons with the Bucks.
“It suddenly hit me not playing with Milwaukee no more after playing with them for 6 years, felt like a breath of fresh air coming to an organization that’s all about the right things, that has a winning culture, a winning mentality, that’s what I want to be apart of. I’ve been a winner my whole life so coming to this franchise was a blessing."
That feeling, Portis said, comes with being around a team he believes is focused on winning rather than a club that was trying to close the book on the season and chase draft position.
His comments also laid bare how rough the 2024-25 season became in Milwaukee. After years as a top-5 seed in the Eastern Conference, the Bucks went 32-50 and landed the No. 10 pick in the draft after the NBA Draft Lottery. For Portis, that slide from contender to 50-loss team hit hard.
“It was tough, bro,” Portis said. “Tough in the sense that we were a 60-win team for so long, a 55-win team for so long.
You go last year, it was just like a lot of highs and lows. I would say it was like a dark cloud.
Obviously, with every day, we heard about where Giannis is being traded. Every day, do these guys fit with him?
Is this a team that can, you know, be a part of the future or whatever."
Portis and Antetokounmpo were among the last pieces still standing from Milwaukee’s championship core, after veterans like Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton were traded and Brook Lopez left in free agency. That shift left the Bucks leaning on a younger group, and Portis said the difference showed when outside noise started piling up.
"Like it was just like a lot of chatter, and we had a young team too," Portis said. "Years before, we had older teams that could block out the noise and not worry about social media.
Last, we had a younger team, so they're reading everything and they're believing everything. You know what I'm saying?
So it was kind of tough.”
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