'Reckless': What league insiders are saying about this stunning set of Bucks moves

The Milwaukee Bucks stunned the NBA universe Tuesday morning when it was reported by ESPN’s Shams Charania that they had agreed to a four-year, $107 million contract with former Indiana Pacers center Myles Turner.

Milwaukee wasn’t a team with cap space. The franchise created the necessary room to sign Turner, the top free agent on the market, 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.

PELTON: How far can the Giannis-Turner frontcourt take Milwaukee?

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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 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.

Turner is eight years younger than Lopez, but their numbers last season were virtually identical. And Turner is now making three times as much money — and that’s before you factor in the more than $22 million in roster charges that will now be on Milwaukee’s books over the next five seasons because of the decision to waive and stretch Lillard’s deal.

Once a team stretches the salary of a player, there is no turning back. The Bucks can’t trade that salary or reduce it in any way, shape or form. Instead, it is stuck on their books until it goes away. Essentially, the Bucks are paying more than $50 million a year for the right to have Turner on their roster. The Bucks have yet to find a replacement for Lillard’s production — 24.9 points, 7.1 assists and 4.7 rebounds per game while shooting 38% from 3 — and had a roster that finished fifth in the East last season.

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What does this mean for the Pacers?

Indiana had been signaling throughout its playoff run that it was going to re-sign Turner, who had spent the first 10 seasons of his career with the team and had become the backbone of their locker room.

But doing so would have meant going into the luxury tax — something the Pacers haven’t done in 20 years. Every time Indiana would indicate it was comfortable paying the tax, rival teams would question whether that was actually the case or whether it was posturing to try to tamp down the market for Turner — the best unrestricted free agent center available in a year in which there was very little cap space.

But no one saw the Bucks creating salary cap space to sign Turner. And once they did, they could then outbid Indiana. Minnesota signing center Naz Reid to a five-year, $125 million contract last week already had complicated the Pacers-Turner negotiations. Turner, a starter on a Finals team, justifiably had reason to believe he was worth more than the $25 million annual value for Reid, a backup big man for Minnesota.

Although Turner is coming off one of the best seasons of his career, he struggled during the later rounds of the playoffs and especially in the Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, averaging 10.6 points on 37.7% shooting (21.4% from 3). Still, his skill set is difficult to find in the NBA among big men, and it’s one the Pacers don’t have on their roster.

As one rival assistant coach said Tuesday afternoon, incredulously, “Why didn’t they pay him?”

But while Indiana’s present has now taken a significant hit between Haliburton’s injury and Turner’s departure, it could lead to a positive impact on the franchise’s future. With Haliburton probably sidelined for next season and the Pacers in control of their first-round draft pick in 2026, they would benefit with a higher draft pick if they take a step back until Haliburton is ready to return.

So, where will the Pacers go from here? They gave Isaiah Jackson — a bouncy center who tore an Achilles in November — a qualifying offer to make him a restricted free agent, meaning he probably will be in their center rotation next season. The remaining options to replace Turner from free agency now are slim, after several names went off the board early. The top one remaining is former No. 1 draft pick Deandre Ayton, who this week was bought out of the final year of his contract by the Portland Trail Blazers — a contract Indiana actually signed him to before the Phoenix Suns matched the offer sheet to bring back Ayton in the 2022 offseason.

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How does this impact Antetokounmpo’s future?

Teams have been waiting to see if Antetokounmpo would choose to ask out of Milwaukee since 2020, when Bucks general manager Jon Horst swung his first massive deal for an impact player — acquiring Jrue Holiday from the New Orleans Pelicans — to help convince Antetokounmpo to stay, a move that helped spur the Bucks to the NBA title the following season. Three years later, Horst used Holiday as a main part of the package to acquire Lillard from Portland.

Now, it appears Horst has managed to do so a third time by securing Turner, who will continue to provide the necessary floor spacing and rim protection next to Antetokounmpo that is required to maximize his talents, as Antetokounmpo is under contract for $54.1 million this coming season and $58.4 million in 2026-27 before he has a $62.7 million player option for the 2027-28 season.

And after Antetokounmpo had a strong close to the regular season, essentially playing as the team’s point guard while Lillard was dealing with the blood clot in his calf that knocked him out for the last month of the regular season, it’s clear Antetokounmpo is going to be reprising that role again this season. That has appealed to Antetokounmpo in the past, especially as he compares himself to other great players who can be the hub of an offense.

“I always felt like that would be my last phase,” Antetokounmpo said in April after the Bucks’ playoff series loss. “As a guy that can playmake and can set up a team, be like a legit point forward out there.”

Over the final few weeks of the season with Lillard sidelined, Antetokounmpo averaged a preposterous 33.4 points, 15.6 rebounds and 6.6 assists while shooting 60% from the field — numbers he could potentially replicate next season with the Bucks, given how often he will have the ball in his hands.

That could leave Antetokounmpo in contention to win a third Most Valuable Player Award — provided he can power Milwaukee to enough wins and can stay on the court under what will be an immense workload, even by his usual standards. Still, sources told Charania that Antetokounmpo and Turner are excited to get the chance to play together.

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What about Lillard?

It’s a rather unceremonious ending to Lillard’s two-year tenure in Milwaukee and his partnership with Antetokounmpo, a star duo that never truly reached the heights projected when they joined forces in the summer of 2023. The Bucks went 73-43 during the regular season when both Antetokounmpo and Lillard shared the floor, but they played together in only three playoff games — the last of which left Lillard with a torn Achilles.

But while it might not seem like a fitting end for Lillard’s Milwaukee stint, it arguably gives him the best possible outcome for his career moving forward. While at least the current expectation, sources said, is that Lillard won’t sign with anyone for the 2025-26 season, he now will get all of the money owed to him and will get the chance to spend the next 12 to 18 months rehabbing his injury then choosing his next destination for the first time in his career as an unrestricted free agent.

Though Lillard is a free agent now, there aren’t many reasons for any team to rush to sign him now — or for him to seek a deal now. Yes, any team could sign him now, but they would have only his non-Bird rights, meaning they could give him only a small raise without using salary cap space or a salary cap exception next summer. And unlike in other sports where teams have more flexibility over how to structure contracts, under the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, year-over-year raises are extremely limited in multiyear contracts, preventing a team from offering Lillard a minimum this season then giving him a balloon payment for the 2026-27 season once he’s healthy.

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How does the Turner signing impact other teams around the league?

Let’s circle back to a trade that floated under the radar during the NBA Finals, when the Pacers sent the 23rd pick in this year’s draft to the Pelicans in exchange for Indiana’s own 2026 first-round pick — which New Orleans received from the Toronto Raptors a few months earlier as part of the trade for Brandon Ingram.

It was interesting — but not completely uncommon — for Indiana to make a trade while competing in the Finals. But it also was curious why the Pelicans were looking to acquire a draft selection in the 20s for one with at least some chance of improving next season.

But that deal happened before Haliburton’s torn Achilles in Game 7 of the NBA Finals — an injury that made it seem likely the Pacers would finish outside of the top handful of teams in the NBA next season.

In retrospect, that deal looks much worse for New Orleans. The Pelicans went on to make one of the most reckless trades in recent memory using that selection, attaching an unprotected pick that will be the better of New Orleans’ and Milwaukee’s selections in 2026 to the Hawks to jump to 13th and draft Maryland big man Derik Queen. And with both Haliburton hurt and Turner elsewhere, Indiana’s own 2026 pick just became a lot more promising.

If the Pelicans hadn’t made that initial trade, perhaps they’d be sitting not only on their own pick — projected to be at least a mid-lottery selection — but they could have had a second potential lottery pick from Indiana, whose pick was top-four protected and very likely to convey. (Sorry, Pelicans fans. We know it has been a long week.)