The Milwaukee Bucks are nowhere near where they want to be. At 18-26, they sit 2.5 games out of the play-in and several realities away from a spot in the top six. They have lost five of six, plus Giannis Antetokounmpo Friday in Denver. He is expected to miss four to six weeks with a calf strain, his second such injury and third overall this season.
Missing Giannis, obviously, makes a seismic difference moving forward, but it’s been this way all season. The general air of frustration and despair has thickened slowly since an 8-5 start. Now it seems more likely that Antetokounmpo is gone by next season than it is the Bucks find their way into the 2026 playoffs. That’s not how anyone in Milwaukee envisioned the season.
No one can seem to catch a glimpse of general manager Jon Horst, either, as he remains behind the curtain while his head coach, Doc Rivers, and face of the franchise, handle the PR side for him. In a piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (subscription required), Bucks writer Lori Nickel called him out for his notable absence from the public eye as the team he built falls to pieces for all to see.
Horst in Hiding?
“One of the disappointing sidebars to this dismal Milwaukee Bucks season is the lack of public availability and accountability from the recently extended general manager, Jon Horst,” Nickel begins.
Let’s start there. Did Horst really earn that vote of confidence? That title ring is five years old. The Bucks extended him last April on the heels of a third straight first-round exit, the return on investment of a disastrous Damian Lillard trade. On top of failed free agent signings and trades – adding Kevin Porter Jr. last deadline might be his best maneuver in recent memory – Horst has a draft record whose pull of doom is strong as a black hole.
The last Bucks draft pick to amount to anything in the NBA? Excluding Porter, technically a Bucks pick that was traded on draft night, that would be Donte DiVincenzo in 2018. He spent three and a half years in Milwaukee before being traded midway through the 2021-22 season. Instead of selecting mature, NBA-ready contributors, Horst has a penchant for taking young projects who can’t help the team in win-now mode.
The jury is out on Bogolijub Markovic, this year’s pick at No. 47, who is currently stashed overseas. All four of the picks from the three years prior – MarJon Beauchamp, Chris Livingston, AJ Johnson, and Tyler Smith – were off the roster by opening night.
Okay, time to get back back on track, something it seems increasingly unlikely this Bucks season will ever do. It all adds up to a lot of hard questions for Giannis and his teammates, questions reporters and fans have every right to ask.
“How does Horst feel about the roster he assembled and touted in December?” Nickel continues.
Bucks fans are still waiting on an answer.
“It would have been good to see Horst take a share of this responsibility, too. Or at least share some of the burden of public accountability.”
No sign of him. His big-free agency signing, likely to haunt the Bucks’ payroll for years? To say the least, center Myles Turner hasn’t been what they paid for with that four-year, $109 million contract. No word on that from Horst. He can stay in his office concocting fake trades on FanSpo that the Bucks don’t have the assets to make.
Improving the roster is all but impossible without leaving the future even bleaker than the desert it already is. Horst has left the asset cupboard bare chasing stars since the 2021 title. The Bucks don’t control their own first-round pick until 2031. They have no tradeable second-rounders.
Of course, the core of the Bucks’ problems are due to more than just the obvious underachievement of certain additions, or the failure to make the right ones. Horst has tried. Signing Lillard seemed like a swing with potential, though pending disaster was already there for those looking. Waive and stretching Dame to clear cap space for Turner. Okay, that seemed defensible through a win-now lens, though perhaps that was merely stubborn delusion.
It’s not really about the fact that Horst has whiffed in the draft and dragged the team under with botched trades. He has only had so many arrows in the quiver, and no one shoots straight every time.
Fans’ frustration, as Nickel describes, is more that he just hasn’t been there to take part in the explanation of what has all gone so terribly wrong, and what the organization’s plans are for the rest of this season and in the future.
As much as Giannis has leaned into the villain role, he has also had an unfair load to carry leading an undermanned, underperforming roster on the court and representing an unresponsive front office off it. Nickel’s characterization paints Giannis in a sympathetic light.
“Instead, the employee, Antetokounmpo, bore the brunt of so many questions that were the consequences of choices and decisions of his boss and supervisor, Horst.”
Maybe he’ll pull another rabbit out of his hat this trade deadline and pull back the curtain then. Bucks fans, though, shouldn’t count on it.
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