As teams labor to cobble together serviceable playoff rosters, there is no greater mid-season movement facilitator than the trade deadline. That date came and went with smoke—but no fire—on the Giannis Antetokounmpo front, as rumors swirled around his departure evaporated into the ether for yet another tractionless Milwaukee news cycle.
Second only to the trade deadline is the subsequent buyout market. Typically, this nebulous term kicks off shortly after each trade deadline, in which teams brute-force offload contracts that the management no longer values for any number of reasons. Damian Lillard became an unwitting participant in this segment when the Bucks waived and stretched his salary in the 2025 offseason.
The Bucks, fresh off acquiring Ousmane Dieng in the team’s only trade deadline move, cast their bait into the post-deadline buyout waters, coming back with Cam Thomas, who most recently played for the Brooklyn Nets.
For the uninitiated, Cam Thomas shoots. A lot. Often to the team’s detriment.
Outside of the unproven Dieng, adding Cam Thomas appears to be the final move for the Bucks this season. To put into perspective just how bad a move that is, let’s examine Milwaukee’s ancillary moves first.
Bucks' latest moves just made Blazers' Damian Lillard deal look even better
The Bucks traded away Amir Coffey and Cole Anthony to facilitate this deal. While that’s well and good, Cam Thomas in particular is a peculiar substitute for those two and was a buyout addition, so the Bucks gave nothing up; in other words, they willingly invited this situation into the building.
On paper, Cam Thomas flatly replaces Cole Anthony’s position as a loose-cannon volume scorer that is allergic to defense. They both shoot the same from three for their career, down to a tenth of a percent. But while Anthony’s offensive contributions weren’t world-beating, his defense was downright passable.
With that said, Thomas is so bad at defense that he demands to be hidden on every possession. Thomas has posted a career Defensive Win Shares mark of 3.1, meaning that his defense has contributed to just 3.1 wins across his entire five years in the NBA. To put that into perspective, notably poor defender Trae Young had 2.6 DWS across a number of minutes similar to Thomas’s career number.
Milwaukee’s front office is currently flanking its star player with defensive sieves and seems poised to start a rebuild while Giannis is on the clock. They currently sit ninth in the overall standings, but the eight teams ahead of them in the tank race have had their collective foot on the gas since the season began.
As we saw here in Portland, the balancing act of keeping one’s stars while cratering for picks is a precarious path often fraught with difficulty, and watching Milwaukee try to navigate this landscape makes the Lillard trade look better by the day.