The Milwaukee Bucks have made a solid job of upgrading their backyard this summer.
With the addition of Delon Wright and Gary Trent Jr. via free agency and AJ Johnson via the draft, the team has gotten younger, more athletic, and more defensive, which was one of the most glaring issues from last season. Still, if they want to move a little further in that direction and continue to add similar players, there are a few things they could do.
Bleacher Report’s Grant Hughes has proposed a fictitious exchange This could make it happen. The Chicago Bulls are in a weird situation where they seem to want to rebuild but are perhaps a little too good for it, so contenders could find pieces there to bolster their rosters. Zach LaVine is the most talked about, but Hughes has a different idea that we can analyze below.
In this trade, the Bucks get Ayo Dosunmu, sending Pat Connaughton and a 2031 first-round pick. This way, Milwaukee would add a promising young player to the roster while moving away from a veteran who was already in talks before the trade deadline.
At just 24 years old, Dosunmu is an interesting player who has likely caught the attention of some teams, but it’s unclear what the Bulls want to do with him.
He looked very good last season, but he’s not the kind of player you’d build a team around, so Chicago could look to trade him and get some draft capital. While he’s not as visible as the recently traded Alex Caruso, he looks like the kind of player who’s built to be a solid role player in a winning environment, so if they go into tanking mode, he might not be a good fit at all.
He could find himself in a similar situation to P.J. Washington’s last year. Nobody in Charlotte thought Washington wasn’t a good player; he just wasn’t on a team where he could thrive the way he did in Dallas, where he was given the role of 3-and-D.
The Hornets saw that he was a bit older than their current young core and that his market value was likely at its highest, so they decided to trade him for a first-round pick they could use in the future. The question now is, do the Bulls view Dosunmu the same way?
We will come back to this later. Let us first start by analyzing this false exchange by analyzing the point of view of the two parties involved.
