The Milwaukee Bucks stunned the NBA universe Tuesday morning when they agreed to a four-year, $107 million contract with former Indiana Pacers center Myles Turner, the top free agent on the market, sources told ESPN's Shams Charania.
Milwaukee wasn't a team with cap space, yet it created the necessary room by waiving future Hall of Famer Damian Lillard, an All-Star in his two seasons in Milwaukee who was owed more than $110 million over the final two years of his contract.
The Pacers, meanwhile, lost their longest-tenured player after the franchise reached its first NBA Finals in 25 years. With Turner in the lineup, the Pacers knocked the Bucks from the playoffs in the first round during each of the past two seasons.
Before Game 7 of the NBA Finals, Indiana looked as if it would head into next season as the likely favorite from the Eastern Conference. Tyrese Haliburton's torn Achilles injury and now Turner's departure have fundamentally changed where the Pacers sit in a wide-open East race that is led by the Cleveland Cavaliers and the New York Knicks and has become much more intriguing after a flurry of moves from the Atlanta Hawks and the Orlando Magic.
With Turner, the Bucks believe they are in that mix too, once again swinging a risky deal to maximize superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo's prime. Here's a look at the ramifications of Milwaukee's shocking maneuver -- one that will have ripple effects across the NBA -- and how league insiders are reacting.
What does this mean for the Bucks?
With Antetokounmpo on the roster, the Bucks are always under pressure to win. And after losing in the first round of the playoffs in three consecutive seasons, including a five-game rout to the Pacers this spring, that pressure only intensified.
During that series, Lillard went down with an Achilles tear, leaving Milwaukee with a $54 million hole on its roster this season and limited draft assets to fill it. Antetokounmpo has made public his desire to win multiple championships, and ESPN's Shams Charania reported earlier this summer that Antetokounmpo was planning to monitor the team's moves while considering whether Milwaukee remained his best path to title contention.
So, rather than just re-signing most of their players -- outside of center Brook Lopez, who agreed to a deal with the LA Clippers on Monday night -- the Bucks sprung the most surprising move of the offseason and found a younger version of Lopez, to boot.
But Tuesday morning's move was shocking on multiple levels -- both for what the Bucks did (landing Turner) and how they did it (waiving and stretching Lillard's remaining $112 million on his contract).
Though Turner is a quality player, stretching such a staggering amount of money to create the salary cap space to sign him wasn't seen favorably by rival executives.
"Reckless," one executive said.
"That's a move you talk yourself into in the boardroom in July when you have nowhere else to go," another executive said, "and you turn a bad situation into a worse one. They're going to look at this in two years and say, 'What did we do?'"
Turner played a huge role in Indiana's run to the Finals, giving the Pacers the coveted combination of rim protection and 3-point shooting from a 7-footer. But Lopez did the same thing for Milwaukee over the past several years, which is why he was such a perfect fit to play alongside Antetokounmpo in the Bucks' frontcourt.
