Sconnies Speak

Author: rchakravart4

  • The Effect of the Transfer Portal and NIL on March Madness

    By: Jack Kohr

    The NCAA Tournament has always been full of surprises. However, this year, the surprise was, coincidentally, the lack of surprises. For the first time since 2008, and only the second time in the history of the NCAA Tournament, all four No. 1 seeds made it to the Final Four. This raises the question: What made the top teams this year so dominant? 

    The answer: The transfer portal and NIL. 

    The transfer portal was introduced in 2018 as a new system for NCAA athletes to declare their intent to transfer and receive contact from other programs. From 2018 to 2021, however, transfer players were required to sit out for one year after transferring before they could play for their new school.

    In 2021, transfer portal rules were updated so that first-time transfer athletes were granted eligibility to play for their new school immediately. This updated eligibility requirement, in addition to the change allowing student-athletes to profit off of their name, image, and likeness, made recruiting, particularly in basketball and football, a “pay-for-play” environment. 

    In 2024, portal rules were updated again, removing the limit on the number of times athletes can transfer during their career without penalty. Although college athletes have essentially become quasi-professional athletes today, NIL deals in tandem with transfer portal rules that allow players to jump from school to school every year give big programs a major advantage. 

    In addition to all four No. 1 seeds making the Final Four, the effect of the transfer portal and NIL was visible in the Sweet Sixteen. Other than No. 10 seed Arkansas, an SEC school with a Hall-of-Fame college basketball coach in John Calipari, all teams were, at worst, a No. 6 seed. 

    Then, the favorites in all Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight games proceeded to go 12-0. By giving players the ability to transfer without limitations and schools the power to lure them in with NIL money, we may have just taken the madness out of March Madness. 

    The NCAA tournament coined its name of March Madness because it has been a tournament where truly anything can happen. Low-seeded schools from mid-major conferences like UMBC, St. Peter’s, FAU, Loyola Chicago, and others had the chance to shock the world and put their name on the map. 

    Now, basketball powerhouses can poach the best players from mid-major conferences with the promise of money and the opportunity to play on the biggest stage all season long. This not only leads to mid-major schools being less competitive come tournament time, but also adds firepower to the blue bloods. Take the NCAA Tournament Champion Florida Gators, for example. 

    Florida’s two leading scorers all year, Walter Clayton Jr. and Alijah Martin, were transfers. And guess from where? Mid-major schools. Clayton Jr., the 2025 NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player, transferred from Iona. Alijah Martin helped lead the beloved cinderella No. 9 seed FAU Owls to the Final Four during his sophomore season in 2023 before transferring to the Gators prior to the 2025 season. These are two prime examples of how the transfer portal and NIL are impacting college basketball. 

    While we only have one year of data points, there are certainly concerns for fans who cherish the unpredictability and possibility that is March Madness. If outcomes in the coming years are similar to this year’s tournament, the NCAA may need to rethink the current rules surrounding the transfer portal and NIL.

  • From Terre Haute to Team USA: Jason Swarens’s Big Throws and Bigger Goals

    By: Haley Cohen

    Jason Swarens was just a normal sixth-grade kid from Terre Haute, Indiana. He was like any other middle schooler trying out different sports to see which he felt was the best for him and what he could excel at.

    As he tried these various games, Jason found one sport where he felt like he could see himself being the best: shot put. Little did anyone know that Jason Swarens, that sixth-grade kid going through trials at track and field practice, would go on to be the 2020 Indiana Garage Track and Field Athlete of the Year.

    Now, he has carried over that success to the collegiate level, where Swarens was able to represent his home country on the world’s biggest stage. 

    College athletics is something that is not uncommon in the Swarens family.

    Both of his grandparents were students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His grandmother was a part of Wisconsin’s dance program and his grandfather participated in both football and track and field. His mother and her three siblings went on to also compete at the collegiate level, with each of them making their own path and working hard to reach their goals. This hardworking, goal-oriented mentality is what Swarens grew up around, which can be seen through the way he holds himself and his dedication to succeed.

    Swarens is now in his fifth year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is not only an incredible athlete, but also a smart, hardworking student majoring in mechanical engineering, with that goal-oriented mentality fueling his multi-faceted dedication.

    Swarens was able to represent Team USA at the Under-23 meet in Costa Rica and earned a spot as a Big Ten champion and a national runner-up. He most recently broke the University of Wisconsin-Madison school record with his 21.37-meter throw. All of these awards and titles are because of his drive and determination to be successful in whatever he does. 

    However, achievement is not the only reason Swarens loves shot put. Throughout his throwing career, he has traveled all over the United States and the world, making a significant number of connections with teammates and coaches from a variety of backgrounds. Every meet and practice has become more than just an event because it has shown him different cultures, giving him the opportunity to develop not only as an athlete, but also as a person. 

    Unfortunately, with the accomplishments, there have also been obstacles in Swarens’s path, namely injuries. Every athlete knows injuries come with playing sports. They are extremely frustrating and not only a strain on someone physically but mentally as well.

    In shot put, the motion itself demands explosive throws, which can cause persistent injuries. Those setbacks can mess up practice schedules and keep an athlete from even competing in events. For a dedicated athlete like Swarens, who thrives on routine and strength, those interruptions that injuries can cause are the worst part of the process.

    Swarens has been throwing for 10 years; he knows a thing or two about the sport and all the training and preparation behind it. What have been some of the main takeaways he’s discovered from the countless hours of practicing shot put?

    For the Big Ten champion, it’s all about approaching everything with discipline and precision. Swarens believes the effort that one puts into working on themselves outside of throwing is just as important as practicing the actual action of throwing.

    What exactly does that work entail outside of throwing? It’s the working out in the weight room, keeping up with recovery sessions, and focusing on academics in the classroom. All of these factors go into setting a college athlete up for success.

    For Swarens, it is not just about throwing far; it’s also about giving your all in every way you can in order to be the best athlete that you can be. Skipping class and giving half-hearted effort at practices and workouts can catch up quickly.

    Throughout Swarens’s career at Wisconsin, he has set himself apart, not just by his performance, but also by his attitude and mindset on success. His coaches have appreciated his dedication and commitment to personal success. His teammates have seen him as a trustworthy and motivated athlete. Shot put is a sport that is measured by inches. For Swarens, that success is not just because of natural talent, but also due to his ability to show up, achieve, and improve.

  • House vs. NCAA Settlement: The Death of the Walk-On and How Certain Programs Look to Keep Themselves Afloat 

    By: Trey Kenas

    Five. Thousand. Athletes. A number so staggering leaving one to even question what the total could possibly represent.

    That number stems from the settlement of the House vs. NCAA case, a landmark class-action lawsuit, which involves the NCAA agreeing to pay college athletes nearly $3 billion for the retroactive use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. This agreement also shifted how teams are structured, moving away from scholarship limits and towards roster limits, which makes those walk-on and partial-scholarship athletes pay the ultimate price: cutting them from the team.

    So what does 5,000 represent in totality? It means that 5,000 male and female collegiate athletes, who have spent their entire lives up until this point chasing a dream and an opportunity that could be considered once-in-a-lifetime, will be or already have been asked to step down from attempting to climb the ladder.

    Instead, they’ll have to choose either to pursue their dream at another university or be done altogether. Many athletes who have spent the majority of their lives playing their respective sport will now look to redefine themselves as humans as they prematurely move into the next chapter of their lives, while coaches who have lost depth in their roster will look to redefine their programs in order to keep them afloat. This is the story of the death of the walk-on.

    Oliver Ehrhardt, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was a member of the rowing team before being cut, was one of the many athletes impacted by the new roster ruling.

    On the flip side, Ehrhardt’s head coach at Wisconsin, Beau Hoopman, is now forced to revamp his program after the NCAA announced it will eliminate his roster by more than half, taking the original 90-man cap and trimming it down to 40.

    The implementations of the new NCAA scholarship rules and roster caps are set to be initiated at the start of the 2025-2026 academic year.

    In the case of walk-on Oliver Ehrhardt, he faced reality sooner than he would have expected. Ehrhardt got cut from the program in the fall of 2024, which he believes was due to the roster sizes shrinking.

    Prior to arriving on campus, Ehrhardt was uncommon in comparison to other rowers on Wisconsin’s men’s rowing team, having come into college with rowing experience at the prep level. Very few, if at most a couple athletes, currently on the roster had rowed at the prep level, which Ehrhardt believed to be a separator in that regard.

    The walk-on spent two years at Kent School, a private college preparatory boarding school located in Western Connecticut. However, that added edge proved to be insufficient at the end for Ehrhardt, who was subsequently cut from the roster.

    “It was kind of weird”, Ehrhardt shared. “We did one last erg (ergometer) test and then he (Coach Hoopman) brought out the roster board and I wasn’t on it. I first thought to myself: ‘what should I do?’ Rowing has been a part of my life for the last five years and I thought I could do it more competitively at the collegiate level, but unfortunately I couldn’t.”

    Ehrhardt initially pondered becoming a manager. But, there was a significant downside: he wouldn’t be able to row at Wisconsin again.

    “Being a manager means you can practice with the team and work out with them, but you can’t participate in any races”, Ehrhardt clarified. “On top of that, once you’re a manager, you can’t try out for the team again”, Ehrhardt said.

    The program also offers a practice player position, where individuals can stick around and practice with the team. This opportunity acts in unison with the team manager role, prohibiting the athlete from being able to compete in events. However, unlike a manager, a practice player does have the opportunity to try out again the following year and potentially earn themselves a spot.

    However, for Ehrhardt, it was time to be done.

    The walk-on opted to step away from the program for good, noting it was “definitely sad at first” and “bittersweet.” But, it also signaled a new beginning for Ehrhardt, allowing the walk-on time to begin focusing on other aspects of his life, such as school.

    While he doesn’t regret much from his time on the rowing team, Ehrhardt wishes UW Athletics had been more upfront with what was going on.

    “I think the biggest thing missing from this experience was transparency”, Ehrhardt said. “Long story short, we didn’t really know what was going on the entire time, and Coach Hoopman told us our fates were in the hands of the UW Athletic Department.

    “It felt like Coach Hoopman was the middle man in all of this and knew [some of] what was going on, but not all the details. Regardless it would have been nice to have a representative from the Athletic Department come and talk to us, but that wasn’t the case.”

    As Ehrhardt has now been away from the sport for close to eight months, his responsibilities with the rowing program are old news.

    That’s the opposite for Beau Hoopman, who understands this is just the beginning of a new journey that entails reshaping and keeping a program competitive that has been around for 150 years.

    With that, the two biggest hurdles Hoopman will face with the new changes will be recruiting and funding, with the latter being the more challenging.

    “With last year being our 150th as a program, we haven’t needed alumni up until this to help with funding. Since we’ve been riding the Rose Bowl hog, and as a non-profit, athletes weren’t being paid until recently, so you were able to fund your programs”, Hoopman said.

    With NIL now in the picture, this is no longer the case.

    “Revenue that’s generated by football is going back to football. Revenue that’s generated by basketball is going to basketball. The Olympic sports like us don’t generate revenue for the athletic department, so we’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do to stay competitive”, Hoopman said.

    This is the struggle faced by many programs, such as Hoopman’s, who are digging into the phonebooks, calling up not only notable former alumni, but also general UW-Madison alumni and just general Wisconsinites who are eager and willing to help out the program by any means. Hoopman shared that the initial response from the alumni and general public has been incredibly positive.

    “We have a legacy fund that helps to endow the program. We have a goal of $50 million and are currently at $9 million just from last fall. We have a group that’s trying to raise money for NIL and recruiting, and are sitting at a good spot at the moment.”

    While the foundation for the financial support has been drawn out and executed thus far, the strategy behind upholding a consistent competitive roster is still a work in progress for Hoopman.

    As noted, the head coach lost over 50 roster spots in the House vs. NCAA settlement. Historically, Hoopman and his staff would send out approximately 1,000 letters to kids in Wisconsin and Minnesota to get them to come down to a camp and check out the sport. With the roster size reduction, the coaching staff feels the need to go in a different direction.

    “When you have a bigger pool, you have more guys to select from. That is now gone,” Hoopman said. “For the amount of time and resources it takes to cultivate those camps and lists of kids that are novices, the effort you put in for .01% return is not worth the time, especially if the kid ends up joining the team and they suck or they quit.”

    Athletes quitting during the season was not always a great worry of Hoopman with the 90-man roster size and his next man up mentality. But, with the roster officially sitting at 40 now, the head coach must find the right athletes and not miss on talent. This presents a tricky situation from multiple facets.

    To begin with, the Wisconsin men’s rowing team rarely gets commits from athletes who had rowing experience before coming into college. This is largely attributed to the fact that the rowing team doesn’t offer scholarships, turning away higher prospects to Ivy League and West Coast schools who are able to fit that niche.

    “It’s like buying a diamond ring,” Hoopman said about the recruiting process. “These guys (coaches who are able to offer scholarships) just go to the jewelry store. We go to the mine and find a bunch of slag and sift through it and try to find a raw piece of material. And then we compress it into a diamond. That’s what we do.”

    Given how Wisconsin had recruited preceding the new roster ruling, this puts Hoopman in a difficult situation. Opportunities to develop rowers over time have, in many ways, fallen out of reach. With the smaller roster size, there is now less margin for error.

    “We’re not recruiting guys like Cal does. We get guys that want to be here, but sometimes the guys that want to be here aren’t good enough”, Hoopman acknowledged. “20% of the kids we recruit are worthy varsity athletes. When you limit how many guys you can have in the squad, you have to hit on every guy. That’s the hard part about going down to 40. You can’t miss, because if you miss on a class now, you’re going to be slow for 3 years.”

    While the head coach continues to look for ways to sharpen his recruitment, he has also realized that there is practically no margin for error in regard to maintaining your roster. Hoopman can’t afford to lose rowers, as the consequences of not having enough rowers is that you won’t get a shot at the national championship. This, in itself, is Hoopman’s greatest fear.

    “If we have four guys quit next year, everybody goes to our national championship, everybody on the roster,” Hoopman shared. “If eight guys quit, we will have a hard time boating three eight’s, and three eight’s is what scores points. If you don’t have three eight’s, the likelihood of you getting invited to the national championship is not good, because they’ll take a team that has three eight’s. That’s what I worry about, being a victim of our own attrition.”

    While Hoopman doesn’t necessarily have all the answers at the moment, he knows that if there’s a will, there’s a way. He was a former Wisconsin rower himself who ultimately earned himself a spot on the Olympic team, capturing a gold medal at the 2004 games in Athens.

    But, Hoopman wasn’t an elite rower to begin with during his rowing days. He was initially towards the bottom of the roster when he arrived on campus and had to work his way to the top. Creating a habit of resiliency along his way to the top as a rower, Hoopman will now have to lean into it as a coach as the dawn of a new era begins: one filled with great uncertainty, but even greater hope.

  • Confidence through Compartmentalization: The Story of Ben James

    Author: Francesca Dowd

    Golf is a cyclical game. Many like to say 90% mental, 10% physical. Your mental game affects your golf, and your golf game affects your mental state. How can one be expected to control that?

    The answer is a glittering vision of a trophy. This trophy has found its place in your hands, the hands that have just finished playing through the dirt and sweat of the final round. Your heartbeat is climbing down from its record high during your last putt’s approach to the hole. The slight shake of your wrists sends a signal to your psyche that you gave it your all.

    For the first time in your life, you are able to see yourself. Not in a mirror, not in the roster headshot next to your scorecard of the day, not in the ‘I wish my mom didn’t still have that photo of me on her fridge’ way. You are able to be on the other side of the famous photo displaying the last hole of a prestigious course. You see you, and you see the trophy sitting in your hands.

    Ben James, one of the most promising features of the young golf landscape, can control his mental game. He spends at least one day a week in a moment of isolation. He requires a bed to lie on, a room alone, relaxing music, and his mind. Inside the same mind, he sometimes needs all his strength to fight against, he finds a way to exercise tranquility.

    “I imagine myself being successful at whatever I want to do for that week,” James said about his routine. “It might be golf – I might have a tournament coming up – so I’m imagining myself holding a trophy up at the end of the week. Or it might be a final. Or imagining myself having a good week in lifts. I try it on a Monday or Tuesday – put some headphones in and envision being successful in what I have going on that week.”

    Within the first two minutes of our conversation, he had accomplished every professional athlete’s dream: remind and relay to the public that, contrary to popular knowledge, they too are humans. James has been in the international golf spotlight since his remarkable win at the U.S Kids World Championship at age 10, but that doesn’t exempt him from his history exam on Thursday.

    At only 21 years old, he has already established himself as an incredibly accomplished athlete. Currently, he is ranked third among amateur golfers worldwide as a junior representing the University of Virginia.

    In his freshman season, he set the school record high of five individual tournament wins, earning him the 2023 Phil Mickelson Outstanding Freshman Award, while becoming only the second Cavalier to receive the honor. He also became the first golfer in UVA history to earn First-Team All-American status as a freshman, a recognition he has now earned twice.

    James just recently broke the all-time record for Career Top 10 Finishes at Virginia, with his 24th at the 2025 ACC Championship – a testament to both his consistency and dominance. Having had an incredible imprint on the golf world even prior to his collegiate career, he continues to shatter records at one of the most prestigious golf communities in college and is poised to make a significant impact in the professional realm.

    Yet, as with many athletes who dedicate their lives to sport, James faced hardship following a run of victories.

    The summer following his outstanding freshman season was objectively the lowest point of his career. He was underperforming and failing to make cuts, with looming pressures of the highly anticipated US Amateur tournament and the Walker Cup on his shoulders. His mental game was slipping. He knew there was a disconnect between the mind and the body when the strongest physical aspect of his game, his drive, was abnormally poor.

    He would arrive at the tee box just as he had done for the majority of his life – but his mind would race with stress and discomposure, so his body would swing in an unfamiliar and uptight motion. The drive would land less than ideally. Through this style of play, his statistics began to drop, and his mental strength began to retreat.

    James forced himself to isolate. He spent time in a quiet, calm cabin surrounded by people who would reinvigorate his love for the game. His focus was to get his mind off the world, and ironically, back into golf. This meant that he abandoned the thoughts of rankings, scores, competition, and wins. He let his mind wander instead to an informal place, a place that allowed him to play golf out of passion and thrill-seeking adventure. He was determined to improve his play in isolation because he genuinely sought the fun.

    When speaking of this time with his high school coach, Keith Kaliszewski, he was reminded of an instance he realized James boasts a unique ability to detach from the competitive nature of golf. Kaliszewski had given the team the day off from practice. The weather wasn’t great, and he deemed it to be well-deserved. He felt it necessary to give his athletes a break in order to remind them, especially James, that off-days were a necessary condition of success in sport. Spring break was coming up, go see a movie he thought.

    Kaliszewski was baffled to find out that James took this as an opportunity to do the unusual: play golf. He traded the normal practice facilities, including the country club, for the under-run and in dire need of better management public course down the road from school. James and some of his buddies – zero of whom were adept golfers – decided the best way to spend a less-than-lovely Tuesday afternoon was playing a round.

    It’s inferred that this was a rather informal trip, as teenage boys piled into a car straight off the bell from European history does not necessarily entail them wearing polos and sponsor-laden visors. The banter, the company, and the objective allowed James to make a distinction between his enjoyment and his dedication to reaching professional-level sport.

    Of course, this wasn’t able to limit his talent. In this one-off trip to the Sleeping Giant course, James accidentally shot the course record. His scorecard still hangs on the wall of the stained green carpeted clubhouse that smells of your grandfather’s old cigarettes. Seriously, my 88-year-old grandfather has been playing here with his high school buddies every sunny day since the 9th grade – they did not hold the previous club record.

    James possesses an innate ability to enjoy the game. Within this lies the ability to recognize when he is not. The summer following his freshman year brought a shift in enjoyment, which contributed to the mental conflicts on the course. In his words, he just wasn’t having fun.

    Of the group from Ben’s record round at Sleeping Giant, one seemingly unprofessional, collar-most-likely-unbuttoned-at-all-times friend, was able to offer James an escape. Vincent Landau and Ben James were classmates at Hamden Hall Country Day School. A year after graduation, perhaps a touch more mature, the pair met for another round of golf along the scenic coast of Connecticut.

    The course was nestled in the quiet woods of Branford, with towering oaks framing each fairway. Encompassing the greenery was a strikingly blue horizon and bobbing sailboats glistening in the afternoon light. The sea breeze met the still air of the course, promising a calm and cool energy. This scene vastly contrasted that of the unkept, down-the-road-from-school course, as well as the expectation-fueled competitions James was most in tune with.

    The two were lightheartedly “shooting-the-sh**t” when talks of the US Amateur Tournament came up. Unbeknownst to Landau, this was around the height of James’ upsetting summer season. In what was described as a joking manner around the tee box, the two settled on Landau caddying for James at the 123rd US AM at Cherry Hills Country Club in Colorado. Landau had never caddied before. James was aching to get his semi-professional heart back into the game. It was a recipe for, surprisingly, success. 

    The tournament went ecstatically well for golf’s new Beavis and Butt-Head. James rediscovered his center of gravity in the game, leading to his best finish at the tournament in his advancement to the semifinals. His mind and his body connected through the remarks, or lack thereof, of the caddy by his side. Landau, who came to be known as ‘Vinsanity’ by James’s family and friends that weekend, described his role as expectation-less.

    “That’s the thing, he wasn’t looking for experience in the golf caddying area. He was looking for something to keep his mind off how serious it was. He was asking for a friend, not a colleague.”

    Cherry Hills was littered with a frenzy of media, eager fans, and the top 312 amateur golfers. Yet the pair found a way to make it their own bubble. No conversations of substance, no conversations of pressure, no conversations of golf. Their laughter overcame the whispers of the tall grass around the course. That was until their steps reached the ball.

    James would then flip his routine switch, while Landau became less of a caddy and more of a witness. He and the world watched as James’ shoulders rolled back, jaw set, and eyes calculated his line. His gaze would then lift to the sky for a brief, almost sacred, pause. It would return striking and deliberate, settling back on the green just before the stroke. He became almost meditative – his grip wasn’t tight, but focused. Then, he shot successfully. Multiple times. Landau deserves a sliver of professional credit as he was, in fact, responsible for cleaning the clubs.

    With each immature joke, composed breath, and ritualistic practice, James rebuilt the unique confidence that had always set him apart. He brings an energy to the course that parallels the top professionals, exuberantly confident within the mind while externally unpretentious. Those who are lucky enough to play with him, from his lifelong coaches to some of his closest competitors, remark on his radiating confidence as wildly intimidating.

    “As soon as you get paired with him, and you get out there, it’s like ‘uh oh, I’m in trouble,’” said Coach Kaliszewski. “He’ll hit his first shot, and then he just takes off walking, and you are staring at his back most of the round. It’s all subtle stuff. Absolutely none of it is rude, or unfair, or unsportsmanlike. He’s just confident. He is never slouching; he is never lagging behind. He is always just out there doing his thing – so good luck keeping up with him.

    “This style of control is not talent alone, it is a mindset; it is a mantra. The difference in the level of play comes from the mental process within a shot, is your mind telling you don’t mess this up or I’ve got this shot? For James, it is always the latter. Tell yourself your beliefs 100 times when you are out there. Confidence over everything. If there’s a tight fairway – maybe around the 18th hole and it’s super important – I’m thinking I really need to get this in play, I’ll tell myself, ‘I am going to this fairway.‘ I’ll repeat that to myself about 10 times before I hit a shot, 9/10 times it goes the way I like.”

    His positive accounts on the course, married with his dedication on off days, are guiding him toward mastery of his mental game. But James will always say there is room for improvement. This humility is stitched into the seams of his routine, keeping him grounded even as his performance soars.

    He has experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. He has felt the silencing pain of missed cuts, the mental cartwheels no one else was able to understand, the wins and his face plastered on NBC sports, the noise of expectations, the rush of a playoff-winning putt. It was within these moments that he gained Stoic skills. Moderation and Meditation are where his heart lies. His mental practice and his ability to find the balance between pure passion and professionalism will gain him far more life lessons than winning.

    James has transformed the meaning of the mental game in golf by emphasizing the role of the heart. The heart that brings him to his history classes on Tuesday, the heart that envisions a trophy, not for the sake of vanity, but for the sake of grounding his guidance, the heart that yearns for a friendly face in the greens of Cherry Hills. The heart carries his belief that he has the merit to win every bit of success offered in the world.

    Because on most days, he achieves it.

  • Is it time for the Milwaukee Bucks to rebuild?

    By: Mark Buerger

    Just like clockwork, the Milwaukee Bucks’ routine of being eliminated in the first round continued last month. To make matters worse, it was the Indiana Pacers who remained a thorn in the Bucks’ side, eliminating them in five games in the opening round of the 2025 playoffs.

    It was the second consecutive year that Indiana eliminated Milwaukee in the first round of the playoffs, and the third straight year that the Bucks were sent home packing after just one series.

    As the years pass from Milwaukee’s illustrious 2020 championship run, it feels like Father Time is finally kicking in for the Bucks.

    Star forward Giannis Antetokounmpo and guard Damian Lillard are only getting older, with the former being 30 years old, while the latter is 34 and now facing an extensive recovery for a torn Achilles injury.

    With two stars only getting older and the surrounding pieces not coming together for the Milwaukee Bucks, is it time to press the ‘rebuild button’ on the franchise?

    It all begins with the draft.

    “It takes seven years for negative information to disappear from a credit report. Start the clock for the Milwaukee Bucks. They owe picks or swaps on each of their first-round picks until 2031, which means winning the draft lottery would only benefit their former trade partners,” Fansided’s D.J. Dunson wrote following the team’s first-round exit.

    Without owning the rights to their first-round until 2031, the Bucks currently have no future to build around Antetokounmpo and Lillard. The fact that the Bucks have to “owe or swap” first-round picks for the next seven years shows that creating a future around their two stars is nearly impossible.

    While younger talent could help offset Milwaukee’s depth and financial woes, there doesn’t seem to be a direct avenue to achieving that path in the near future without the requisite draft capital.

    So, how did we get to this stage of repeated first-round exits for the Bucks?

    Things kicked off with a major trade prior to the 2023-24 season, as Milwaukee made a massive move for Lillard, moving fellow point guard Jrue Holiday, a future first-round pick, and two future first-round pick swaps in return.

    While the move brought a second star to Milwaukee, it further sent them away from the vision that won them a championship back in 2021.

    The move depleted the team’s draft capital, making it tougher to improve the roster in other ways, and eventually forced the team’s hand in trading forward Khris Middleton for Kyle Kuzma to gain salary-cap flexibility.

    However, the team’s roster decisions haven’t been the only consequential moves for Milwaukee. Instead, it’s been the revolving door of coaches that has really set the team up for repeated failures in the playoffs.

    First, the Bucks fired championship coach Mike Budenholzer, replacing him with former Toronto Raptors assistant Adrian Griffin. That move initially seemed to pay off for Milwaukee, which started the 2023-24 season with a 30-13 record.

    However, after the promising start to the 2023-24 season, Griffin was fired in a shocking move and was replaced by longtime veteran coach Doc Rivers, who had served as an informal consultant to Griffin midway through the year.

    Since Rivers’s hire, the lack of success cannot be a Milwaukee has been through back-to-back first-round exits in the playoffs, raising questions not only about the team’s future, but also that of star Giannis Antetokounmpo.

    The Bucks’ roster is aging. Not only are Lillard and Antetokounmpo continuing to age, but starting center Brook Lopez is 37, and rotational pieces Bobby Portis, Taurean Price, and Pat Connaughton are all at least 30.

    Therefore, given the lack of draft control and lack of a true identity, it is time for the Milwaukee Bucks to dismantle the roster and head towards a rebuild. By trading Lillard and Antetokounmpo, the Bucks can free up cap space and get much-needed draft capital in return that they can use to build their new future. 

    After back-to-back first-round exits, it may not be the future that Bucks fans envisioned, but it might be a necessary one, given the team’s struggles with the current roster.