The Milwaukee Bucks may have made their Gary Trent Jr. problem look worse by waiting so long to finish the deal.
A $64 million contract for Trent was always going to draw attention after the season he just had, but the timing made it even harder to ignore. According to Joe Vardon of The Athletic, the Bucks didn’t get the agreement done until nearly two weeks into free agency, and that delay only added to the suspicion around the move.
That matters because the first few hours and days of free agency are usually when teams are most aggressive. Clubs spend fast, sometimes recklessly, because they don’t want a target to slip away.
If Milwaukee had locked Trent in right away, the deal would have looked like a familiar early-summer overpay. By waiting until July 11, though, the Bucks were sitting in a market where most teams no longer had the money to chase him, which made the price tag stand out even more.
In other words, Milwaukee wound up bidding against itself.
That’s part of why the league is looking into whether the contract crosses into cap circumvention territory. The Bucks have cooperated with the investigation so far and, according to Vardon, have said they believed the deal matched Trent’s market value. There’s also some support for that argument from ESPN’s Shams Charania, who said on the Shump Street with Iman Shumpert podcast that Milwaukee discussed a sign-and-trade involving Trent at a similar number with at least one other team.
Nothing came together on that front, but it does suggest the Bucks weren’t operating in a vacuum.
Now the franchise is waiting on the NBA to sort it out, and there’s no timetable for when that happens. Vardon pointed to the Kawhi Leonard cap circumvention case as an example of how long these things can drag on, with that situation taking more than a year to resolve. Milwaukee would obviously prefer not to have this hanging over it for anywhere near that long, but for now, the league holds the cards.
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