Following the selection of AJ Johnson with the No. 23 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft on Wednesday night, Milwaukee Bucks general manager Jon Horst spoke with reporters for 20 minutes. Horst discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s newest player, the process that went into making that selection and Johnson’s future, but the Bucks’ lead decision-maker revealed something unexpected after an answer about how Johnson helped address the team’s offseason needs.
GO DEEPER
Bucks go with youth and promise at No. 23, drafting AJ Johnson
“It’s all about winning this year,” Horst said. “It’s been all about winning last year and the year before. It always is. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t, but we always have to have an eye on moving forward.”
If there were any questions regarding the sincerity of that final sentence, Horst and the Bucks brought their vision for the draft into much greater focus by selecting another teenager on Thursday. With the No. 33 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft, the Bucks selected Tyler Smith, a 19-year-old forward who played for the G League Ignite last season.
Smith put together a strong season with the Ignite, averaging 13.7 points, 5.1 rebounds and 1.3 assists in 22.2 minutes per game across 43 games. The 6-foot-9 forward knocked down 36 percent of his 161 3-point attempts and showed off his 7-foot-1 wingspan with 0.9 blocks and 0.8 steals per game. He also performed well in the drills at the combine, posting a 38-inch vertical and a lane agility time of 10.74 seconds, which was the seventh-fastest at the combine and .02 seconds faster than Johnson’s time of 10.76 seconds.
2024 NBA Draft prospect Tyler Smith showed off his clean lefty jumper throughout the season for @gleagueignite, but the mobile forward was especially dangerous from 3-point range on the pick & pop. #TylerSmithWeek pic.twitter.com/KclC3wVw8Y
— NBA G League Ignite (@gleagueignite) June 6, 2024
Even with the strong athletic testing results and solid numbers with the Ignite, Bucks assistant general manager Milt Newton made it clear the team is not expecting Smith to be a significant contributor next season.
“At the end of the day, he is a talent. He is 19 years old and we’re looking at the long play,” Newton said of Smith. “He is a player that we feel — and we have some great coaches that are really good development coaches — he will be a talent for us and we will be able to utilize that talent.
“We’ve got a lot of young players, but we also have some guys more veteran, more mature, older and at some point, you have to have an infusion of talent and we feel like with (MarJon Beauchamp) and the three AJs now, we feel like that’s a good infusion of talent to help them develop.”
In a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with selecting high-upside young players who are likely not going to contribute much in their first season at the bottom of the first round and start of the second round. For a team that currently doesn’t have another draft pick on their books until a 2026 first-rounder (tied up in a pick swap with the New Orleans Pelicans), these two picks could reasonably be viewed as the team’s last realistic opportunity to add young talent to their roster without trading one of their top five rotation players away.
But no team is operating within a contextless void.
The Bucks are expecting to contend for an NBA title next season, especially now that Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard have been given both a full offseason to build their chemistry and a veteran head coach who could lay out his vision for them before they started their offseason work. From a salary cap perspective, the Bucks are projected to be a second apron team again next season with a top-heavy roster pushing to win a championship.
But the team still has openings in their rotation. With the seemingly inevitable departure of starting shooting guard Malik Beasley, the Bucks will have 2,337 rotation minutes at shooting guard from last season to fill for the 2024-25 season. They ended last season with Patrick Beverley as their backup point guard and defensive stopper, but he is also a free agent this offseason. Yet, the front office drafted two players who they are not expecting to contribute in a significant way next season.
“Two 19-year-olds, we don’t think — we could be surprised — that they will be rotational players right now in the near future, but it wasn’t about that; it was about adding talent to this team,” Newton said. “And if you’ve looked, especially this past year and in the playoffs, teams are younger, getting up and running and long and athletic. We feel like that’s the trend of the NBA and we feel like we added two players that can add to that.
“As far as adding play-now players, we’ll deal with that in free agency.”
The pressure on Horst and the front office to find contributors in free agency is real. They need to find a couple of players who can contribute next season and they only have three roster spots in which to find those players.
As of now, the Bucks have 12 of their 15 roster spots filled for next season.
- Six of the rostered players — Antetokounmpo, Lillard, Khris Middleton, Brook Lopez, Bobby Portis, Pat Connaughton — are NBA veterans who have competed at the highest level and will be expected to do so once again next season.
- Four of the players — Beauchamp, AJ Green, Andre Jackson Jr., Chris Livingston — are unproven players still on their rookie contracts, but Green and Jackson got playoff minutes this past season, even if that might have been a product of injuries elsewhere on the roster.
- Two of the players are rookies that the Bucks are expected to sign, but not see contribute in a meaningful way on the floor next season.
The Bucks are right to not put unrealistic expectations on Johnson and Smith to contribute next season. They were two of the 15 youngest players in this year’s draft pool and they need to put in the work to realize their full potential, but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation in Milwaukee.
Even if young players such as Green and Jackson take steps forward and grab spots in Rivers’ rotation next season, the Bucks still need to fill some rotation minutes. Armed with only veteran minimums, finding players talented enough to fill those roles will be difficult, but the Bucks will at least be able to sell prospective players on the opportunity in Milwaukee. They plan to contend for a championship and they have real rotation minutes that remain open.
While the Bucks don’t need to sign a superstar player or totally remake their roster, few general managers will be facing more pressure or trying to complete a more difficult task than Horst when free agency opens on June 30 at 5 p.m. CT.
(Photo of Tyler Smith: David Becker / NBAE via Getty Images)
