Milwaukee's record now reads 0-3. The Bucks have lost three straight, and they sit 15th in the East.
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The first loss came on October 21 at the Wizards, 116-128. Jaquez Jr. scored 18 points and Tyler Herro had 17. Two nights later, on October 23, Milwaukee fell at home to the Bulls, 125-132. Herro scored 34 points. Jaquez Jr. added 19 points and 11 rebounds. On October 24, the Bucks lost at the 76ers, 116-127. Jaquez Jr. led the team with 21 points. Kel'el Ware had 19 points and 13 rebounds. Herro and Jaquez Jr. have carried the scoring, and it has not been enough. The power rankings moved Milwaukee from 25th to 21st as of October 23.
The health picture improved. Nate Ament had been day-to-day with a left ankle issue since October 7. He was cleared on October 21, which closes that thread. Jericho Sims, who went day-to-day with an undisclosed issue on October 16, was cleared on October 20.
The roster kept turning over. Marcus Garrett joined on October 17 and left on October 18. Jake Stephens, Johni Broome and Pete Nance also left on October 18. Then Nance came back. The Bucks re-signed him to a two-way contract on October 20. On October 19, the Bucks cut Kevin Porter Jr.
Porter's name returned on October 24. A report said Milwaukee turned down a potential Porter trade with the Nuggets. The report gives no terms. It also comes five days after the team cut him, so what that deal would have looked like is unclear.
Another trade item surfaced on October 21. A report said the Bucks are among the teams the Warriors contacted about Porzingis. Nothing more has been reported. The earlier Jake Fischer item, which named the Bucks, Lakers, Grizzlies and Hornets as teams exploring trades, has not been updated since October 16.
Some older items are unchanged. The league's inquiry into the Bucks' trade for Gary Trent Jr., first reported September 23, has no new detail. The headline-only roundups from September 16, September 24 and October 6 still name Bucks players with nothing reported underneath.
So the week has a clear shape. Milwaukee has lost three in a row. Ament and Sims are healthy again. Porter is gone, and Nance is back on a two-way deal. Two trade items involve the Bucks, and neither has detail yet.
Open storylines
as of Sun, Oct 25Milwaukee is 0-3 and 15th in the East after losing to the Wizards, Bulls and 76ers by 12, 7 and 11 points.
The Warriors contacted the Bucks and other teams about Porzingis on Oct. 21, with no further detail reported.
Milwaukee reportedly turned down a Nuggets trade for Porter on Oct. 24, five days after cutting him.
The league's inquiry into the Gary Trent Jr. trade, reported Sept. 23, still has no new detail.
The Bucks, Lakers, Grizzlies and Hornets were reported exploring trades by Oct. 16, with no specifics since.
The projection
all 30 teams →The season depends most on Ryan Rollins (8.5 wins without him), AJ Green (8.0 wins without him), Jaime Jaquez Jr. (1.5 wins without him) and Myles Turner (0.1 wins without him): on/off from 2026-27, details under Injuries. Computed Sun, Oct 25; the method is on the methods page.
The race
Eastern Conference · 79 games leftNext 5: vs Pacers50%vs Rockets100%vs Cavaliers50%at Timberwolves100%at Celtics50%opponents win 70% of their games on average
Standings and games back are from the official table; the pace is the current record carried over 82 games, nothing more.
Day by day
26 days on the recordEarlier on the record22 more days · back to Mon, Sep 7
The franchise
Every season since the start →Public record →Nowupdated 2026-10-19
The Bucks enter 2026-27 under new head coach Taylor Jenkins, hired April 30, who built his reputation in Memphis after coming up on Mike Budenholzer's Milwaukee staff back in 2018-19. He inherits a roster built almost entirely this year: on June 23, Milwaukee traded Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis to Miami for Tyler Herro, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kel'el Ware and Kasparas Jakučionis, then used the same draft to take Brayden Burries at 10th and Nate Ament at 13th. Myles Turner, who signed away from the rival Pacers using cap room freed by stretching Damian Lillard's contract, anchors the frontcourt alongside Kyle Kuzma, Ryan Rollins, Kevin Porter Jr. and AJ Green. Last season was rough: a 32-50 finish, the offense ranked 24th in the league and the defense 26th, with a net rating of minus-6.1, 25th of 30. Payroll sits at $191.4 million across 19 contracts, over the salary cap but under the luxury tax, with Herro ($33.0 million), Turner ($26.6 million), Lillard's $22.5 million option and Kuzma ($20.3 million) the biggest numbers. Doc Rivers resigned after that season. The summer's loudest talk has carried into October, with Jake Fischer reporting the Bucks exploring trades alongside the Lakers, Grizzlies and Hornets.
Identity and rivalries141 words
For nearly two decades this was Giannis Antetokounmpo's team, and the roster Jenkins now runs no longer has an obvious identity to replace that — last season's offense and defense both ranked in the bottom ten of the league, and the pace sat at 98.33. The sharpest rivalry still running is with the Pacers, who eliminated Milwaukee in the first round in both 2023-24 and 2024-25, the second time ending with Lillard tearing his Achilles; Turner now wears green and cream instead of Pacers blue, which only sharpens that history. The Celtics loom too, after the Bucks blew a 3-2 series lead to Boston in the 2022 playoffs. Both rivalries now carry a different weight: Milwaukee isn't chasing a title through them, it's trying to find out where this new roster stands against the teams that used to end its seasons.
Home, owners and numbers88 words
The Bucks play at Fiserv Forum, which opened August 26, 2018, in downtown Milwaukee, replacing the Bradley Center that broadcaster Lloyd and Jane Bradley Pettit had donated decades earlier. Ownership is led by Jamie Dinan and Wes Edens, with Jimmy and Dee Haslam and Junior Bridgeman among the larger stakeholders; Bridgeman, a former Bucks player, holds a 10% share, and his number 2 is retired by the franchise. Aaron Rodgers is a minority owner. Bango, the team's mascot since 1977, still works the crowd at every home game.
What they are chasing144 words
Milwaukee is chasing an identity more than a trophy right now. The roster is a season old in its current form, the team missed the playoffs last season for the first time since 2016-17, and the trade that remade the roster — Antetokounmpo and Portis for Herro, Jaquez Jr., Ware and Jakučionis — is still an open question for fans arguing whether the return will look fair in a year or two. Milwaukee's own first-round picks are mostly tied up in swaps through 2030, with a 2030 second owed to Orlando, so there's no obvious high pick coming to fast-track a rebuild. With Fischer's reporting naming the Bucks among teams shopping more deals, the argument now is whether Jenkins gets to keep this group intact long enough to find out what it is, or whether another trade is already being worked on underneath it.
The long view465 words
The Milwaukee Bucks are a National Basketball Association franchise based in Milwaukee, playing in the Central Division of the Eastern Conference. The team was founded in 1968 as an expansion franchise, awarded to Milwaukee Professional Sports and Services, Inc., a group headed by Wesley Pavalon and Marvin Fishman. A fan contest drew over 40,000 entries; judges chose "Bucks" over the more popular "Robins," honoring Wisconsin's white-tailed deer. The Bucks marked the NBA's return to Milwaukee after the Hawks had left for St. Louis in 1955. Their first regular-season game came in October, before a Milwaukee Arena crowd of 8,467.
The franchise has won two league championships, in 1971 and 2021, three conference titles (Western: 1971, 1974; Eastern: 2021), and 19 division titles between 1971 and 2024, plus the 2024 NBA Cup. They are the only NBA team to win a championship in both the Western and Eastern Conference. The 1971 title came in the team's third season, after Milwaukee won a coin flip for the rights to draft Lew Alcindor, who later took the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and then traded for Oscar Robertson. That team went 66–16 and swept the Baltimore Bullets. The Bucks returned to the Finals in 1974, losing to the Boston Celtics in seven games despite Abdul-Jabbar's double-overtime "sky hook" in game six. Abdul-Jabbar was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975 for Elmore Smith, Junior Bridgeman, Brian Winters, and David Meyers.
The Bucks stayed competitive under coach Don Nelson, who won NBA Coach of the Year in 1983 and 1985, with players like Sidney Moncrief, Marques Johnson, Bob Lanier, and Terry Cummings. In 1983 they swept the Celtics, the first team to do so in a best-of-seven series. The 1990s brought seven straight losing seasons and a costly draft-day trade sending Dirk Nowitzki to the Dallas Mavericks for Robert Traylor. The team rebuilt around Glenn Robinson and Ray Allen, and under coach George Karl the "Big Three" of Allen, Sam Cassell, and Robinson reached the 2001 Eastern Conference Finals, losing to the Philadelphia 76ers in seven games.
The modern era centers on Giannis Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton, Jrue Holiday, and Damian Lillard, culminating in the 2021 championship. Abdul-Jabbar and Antetokounmpo combined for five MVP awards for the franchise, and both are the only Bucks players to win Finals MVP.
Ownership has passed from Herb Kohl, who bought the team in 1985 to keep it in Wisconsin, to a group led by Wes Edens and Marc Lasry, approved by the NBA's Board of Governors on May 16, 2014. Jon Horst, formerly the team's director of basketball operations, now runs basketball operations, succeeding John Hammond. The Bucks played for years at the Bradley Center, renamed the BMO Harris Bradley Center after a 2012 naming-rights deal, before moving to their current home, Fiserv Forum.