Best Draft Pick In Milwaukee Bucks History

The Milwaukee Bucks entered the NBA in 1968 as an expansion team with very little in the way of a competitive roster, which ultimately resulted in a 27-win first season that earned them a coin flip against the Phoenix Suns for the first overall pick in the 1969 NBA Draft.

The Bucks won the toss and selected Lew Alcindor, one of the most decorated college players in NCAA history, who had led UCLA to three consecutive national championships and compiled an 88-2 record. In his second season, after trading for Oscar Robertson, the Bucks went 66-16 and swept the Baltimore Bullets in the NBA Finals. Alcindor was named Finals MVP, and Milwaukee had delivered the fastest championship in expansion team history. He would go on to average 30.4 points, 16 rebounds, and 4.1 assists over six seasons before requesting a trade to Los Angeles.

Sidney Moncrief, selected fifth overall in the 1979 NBA Draft out of Arkansas, also deserves mention as the team’s best draft pick. The cornerstone of the Bucks' dominant run through the 1980s, Moncrief was a five-time All-Star, a two-time Defensive Player of the Year (the first player ever to win the award), and a Hall of Famer inducted in 2019.

However, the title of the Milwaukee Bucks' greatest draft pick in franchise history is Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the argument starts with his upbringing. While Alcindor arrived as the most celebrated college player in America, a consensus No. 1 pick that any franchise would have taken, Antetokounmpo was the exact opposite. A raw, skinny eighteen-year-old from Athens playing in a second-division Greek league, he had never set foot in the United States, spoke limited English, and had grown up in poverty, so much so that he and his brother had to share basketball shoes during the same game. Fourteen teams passed on him before Milwaukee selected him 15th overall in the 2013 NBA Draft. Of the players chosen before him, only Victor Oladipo would make an All-NBA and All-Star team.

Over the last thirteen years, Antetokounmpo’s journey has been one of the greatest rags-to-riches stories in the history of professional sports. Standing 6'9" with a seven-foot-three wingspan, Antetokounmpo grew both literally and figuratively into one of the most physically imposing and dominating players in the NBA. While the Bucks finished with 23 more losses in Antetokounmpo’s first season than the year prior, he would soon help Milwaukee to ten playoff appearances in the next eleven seasons.

Nicknamed "The Greek Freak" for his athleticism and ability to play anywhere on the court, Antetokounmpo transformed himself from a string-bean teenager who averaged 6.8 points and 4.4 rebounds as a rookie to winning the league’s Most Improved Player in 2017, back-to-back MVP awards in 2019 and 2020, and then delivering Milwaukee its first championship in fifty years in 2021. In his first trip to the Finals, Antetokounmpo averaged 35.2 points, 13.2 rebounds, and 5 assists in the Finals against the Phoenix Suns, highlighted by a 50-point, 14-rebound, and 5-block effort in the title-clinching Game 6, claiming Finals MVP in the process.

A two-time Defensive Player of the Year, with ten All-Star appearances, nine All-NBA selections, the thirty-one-year-old forward still has plenty of mileage left on his career. He signed a supermax extension in 2020, committing his future to Milwaukee when he could have chased a larger market and more guaranteed rings, a sign of loyalty that is often not seen in today’s sporting world.

Alcindor was the greatest college player of his era, and Milwaukee was right to take him first. But Antetokounmpo was a diamond in the rough, one that the Bucks helped develop into a generational talent. The combination of discovery, development, and longevity with the team makes him the greatest draft pick in Bucks history.