If the Bucks want Giannis Antetokounmpo to stay, Doc Rivers has to go

On Tuesday morning, ESPN published an insider's look at a situation that, generally speaking, everyone on the outside could already see just fine: The Milwaukee Bucks are a mess. 

The roster stinks. Giannis Antetokounmpo's mixed messaging has reduced whatever he says next to a grain of salt. The front office waited too long to pull the plug on the Antetokounmpo era, and in trying to keep it on life support, is now stuck with a bill that is well north of $200 million for Myles Turner and Damian Lillard, who doesn't even play for them anymore. 

And then there's coach Doc Rivers.

Looking back, the first desperate domino to fall in Milwaukee was the Jan. 2024 firing of Adrian Griffin and the subsequent hiring of Rivers. At the time, you thought there was still a real chance for the Bucks to compete, not because of the Rivers hire, but because they had Antetokounmpo, Lillard and Khris Middleton as the core of a team that was 30-13 under Griffin. 

Bucks under investigation as Giannis Antetokounmpo speaks out, but the messaging doesn't add up

Brad Botkin

Since that time, the Bucks have gone 95-100 under Rivers, who has, per his comically consistent tradition, called upon every excuse in the book to absolve himself of any blame. And don't think for a second that it hasn't caught the eye of the man at the center of this storm. 

The following excerpt is from a Q&A Antetokounmpo did with Lori Nickel of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which was published on Monday, a day before ESPN's drama dump, and can only be described as a thinly veiled shot at Rivers. 

Do you see a path for you to come back and stay here?

Antetokounmpo: "100%. Yeah, yeah."

What would you need to see?

Antetokounmpo: "Everything about my decision is based on winning; culture. Like you saw I talked with [Boston] coach Joe Mazzulla. I said, 'you had so many opportunities to make excuses, but you didn't.' [The Celtics started the season slow.] And he said, 'Oh, they're good players.'

"I said, no. It's about the mentality that you instilled in your place. [Greek national team coach] Vassilis Spanoulis -- the same thing. That's why I love Spanoulis. It's about the mentality that he's instilled in the [Greek] national team, that we are here to give everything that we have. We are here to bond together. We are here to figure out ways to win. No excuses. Move as a group and you move as a unit. So, I love that."

In the interest of fairness, let's be clear: The Celtics, top to bottom, have way better players than the Bucks, so Mazzulla isn't wrong in citing them as the main reason for Boston's success this season. But Antetokounmpo also isn't wrong to note the galvanizing power of an accountable leader that doesn't make excuses. 

If the situations were reversed, you can bet that Rivers would've been all too happy to take the crutches from Jayson Tatum and lean on them himself. 

If Giannis wants 'no excuses,' Doc Rivers does not align

This is a guy whose teams have coughed up more 3-1 playoff leads than any coach in history, and yet he thinks he doesn't get enough credit for the three wins. 

In Philadelphia, he played the Ben Simmons card so many times you would've thought he was dealing off the bottom of the deck. After Simmons got traded, Rivers needed a new scapegoat -- and sure enough, he wound up saying James Harden became selfish after he didn't make the All-Star team in 2023, basically citing that as the reason the 76ers fell short of a championship, or at least contending for one. 

The icing on the cake was when Rivers lost seven of his first 10 games with the Bucks, only to let everyone in the basketball world know how difficult it is to take over a team midseason. Never mind that any unemployed coach would jump at the chance to inherit a team led by Antetokounmpo, Lillard and Middleton. That's an honest dream job, and it didn't take him three weeks before he was making it out to be a nightmare. 

You might remember JJ Redick, who played for Rivers with the Los Angeles Clippers, going scorched earth on his former coach during his brief broadcasting days. 

None of this is to suggest that some of, if not many of, Rivers' excuses aren't rooted in at least some truth. It's true that Antetokounmpo and Lillard were both hurt in the 2024 playoffs, and Lillard again in 2025 when he ruptured his Achilles. Perhaps some of the players really were already mentally checked out for the All-Star break when the Bucks lost to the Grizzlies on Feb. 15, 2024, to run their initial record to 3-7 under Rivers, after which he famously surmised: "We had some guys here, some guys in Cabo." 

But if a team is checking out on its coach 10 games into his tenure, doesn't that reflect at least somewhat on the coach's inability to light the proverbial fire? Isn't it on the coach to at least make the best of the hand he's been dealt rather than whine about the cards he can't change anyway? That's the way the majority of coaches would frame it, at least publicly, but Rivers isn't most coaches. He has no problem letting himself off the hook, as he did again this season when the Bucks were officially eliminated from the postseason. 

"It's been disappointing, obviously," Rivers said of his Milwaukee tenure after a 32-point loss to the Spurs on March 28. "Since I've been here, I haven't had a healthy stretch and it's been your key guys. It's been Giannis. It's been Dame. And you hope you can play through that, but we just haven't had the ability. This year, having only one quote-unquote star. Every other team has two and three. We needed health. We were thin. We knew that before the season started and it just didn't go our way. All the talk and all that stuff probably didn't help either."

A couple of things stand out here. First, Rivers saying "I" haven't had a healthy stretch is telling. The prism through which he's answering this question is one of self-defense, because he hears all the criticism and sees an opportunity to airbrush the picture being painted of him. 

This distances him from the team as if he were a separate entity from his players and will not shoulder the blame for what he sees as their failures. So much so that, according to the aforementioned ESPN article, Rivers is not above dropping his résumé during a team meeting to make sure everyone knows he's not the problem. 

Rivers, who won an NBA title as coach of the Celtics in 2008 and will be enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame later this year, started the meeting by imploring his players to look up his résumé, six people in the room told ESPN.

"I took teams to the playoffs and to the championship that weren't supposed to. I thought this was one of them," Rivers told players in the session. "Either you're with us or against us. If you're not playing hard, we're not playing you anymore.

"I know everything that goes on in this building."

Is this how you galvanize a team? To tell them how great you are, and how much they are letting you down? 

Again, this isn't to say Rivers isn't right about some of this stuff. Obviously, the Bucks have been injured, and the drama with Antetokounmpo -- who needs to take his share of responsibility for how he has handled this increasingly toxic relationship -- has been a distraction. Rivers isn't the principal problem. 

But he's not the solution, either. He wasn't the solution when he was hired in Jan. 2024, frankly. But he's certainly not now. Not now that the Bucks are where they are with Antetokounmpo, who we all know by now likes to say things without actually saying them. 

Over the last few months, Antetokounmpo has dropped just about every euphemistic trade-me hint possible without actually saying "trade me." Now he's saying he doesn't want an excuse-maker as his coach when Rivers is the man with a million excuses. 

Connect the dots. If the Bucks still have any hope of Antetokounmpo staying, then Rivers needs to go.