Milwaukee picks 47th in the second round tomorrow night
It’s June 25th, and we’re just over 4 hours away from the Mavericks going on the clock to start the 2025 NBA Draft! You can, of course, watch it at 7 p.m. CDT on ESPN, but as it currently stands, you won’t see the Bucks pick tonight. More on that below, as we give you a pre-draft roundup of what this year’s festivities might look like for Milwaukee.
Where do the Bucks draft?
Only 47th this year, in the second round. That pick came over from Washington at the deadline this year in the Khris Middleton-Kyle Kuzma (among others) trade, though that pick is actually originally Detroit’s. Before that trade, the Bucks didn’t control any selections in this year’s draft, since they’d traded both of them in years prior—they would have been 19th and 49th.
Milwaukee’s 2025 first-rounder now resides with Brooklyn after originally being traded to New Orleans way back in 2020 in the Jrue Holiday trade. Their 2025 second-rounder was actually dealt a week after that famous transaction in a minor one with Cleveland in exchange for them removing protections on Milwaukee’s 2022 first-round pick, which they previously acquired in 2018. Doing that facilitated the Holiday trade, since the Bucks were trading their 2025 and 2027 firsts to the Pelicans, and due to the Stepien rule, which prevents teams from trading consecutive firsts, that wouldn’t have been possible if the 2022 pick they’d already dealt to the Cavs could have conveyed that year.
Will the Bucks keep their pick? Will they trade up or down?
There have been no rumblings about the Bucks looking to move up or down, whether by trading the 47th pick or trading a different asset to get an additional pick. While it’s certainly possible they could trade into the first round, it would take a pretty good player from their current roster to do so, or their 2031 first-rounder, which is the only future first they can currently trade.
They could also trade their 2031 second-rounder or “buy” another 2025 second-rounder by trading cash to a team for one of their picks. Milwaukee does this from time to time, most recently in 2022 when they sent Indiana cash considerations for the final pick in the draft, which they used on Hugo Besson. It’s worth noting that sending out cash in any trade hard caps a team at the $207.9m second apron, though the Bucks project to be far underneath that.
Potential Bucks draftees
Regarding who the Bucks might pick, it’s incredibly hard to project when 46 players will be drafted first. However, our Finn Kuehl has spent the last month tirelessly profiling players who he thinks would make good Bucks. I highly recommend all his work; if there’s better analysis of who Milwaukee should draft at 47 on the net, I haven’t seen it!
- Six centers the Bucks should target with the 47th pick
- Six wings the Bucks should target with the 47th pick
- Six guards the Bucks should target with the 47th pick
Who has Milwaukee worked out?
Finn also kept tabs on what players did workouts with Milwaukee, or at least the ones publicly known. He gave us write-ups on each of these guys at the links below, not all of whom remain in the draft—those guys are denoted with an asterisk:
- Hansen Yang, Norchad Omier, Jabri Abdur-Rahim, Taelon Peter, Muodubem Muoneke
- Izan Almansa, Dain Dainja, Wade Taylor
- Hunter Sallis, TJ Bamba, Coleman Hawkins, AJ Hoggard
- Mark Sears, Max Shulga, Branton Huntley-Hatfield
- Darrion Williams*, John Blackwell*, Samson Johnson, Gabe Dorsey
I will add a number of players here who have worked out since Finn’s last roundup on June 17th and will be of particular interest: Marquette’s Kam Jones, former Wisconsin Badger-turned-Louisville Cardinal Chucky Hepburn, Senegalese-by-way-of-Italy’s Saliou Niang, Indiana’s Oumar Ballo, Northwestern’s Ty Berry, Minnesota’s Lu-Cye Patterson, and Houston’s Milos Uzan. You can find their full list of publicly known workouts here.
What about the rest of the draft?
Beyond any Bucks possibilities tomorrow (or perhaps tonight?), there are plenty of storylines around the draft, especially who will go after the consensus top two prospects. FanDuel’s latest odds obviously have Cooper Flagg (-100000, lol) and Dylan Harper (-20000) as the first and second picks, respectively, but things are a little more interesting from there. In light of his canceled workouts with teams, Ace Bailey is falling and is now only favored to go sixth. Milwaukee native and Duke standout Kon Knueppel is projected to stay in his current state of North Carolina and be picked fourth by Charlotte.
We will be streaming both rounds of the draft tonight and tomorrow on our Playback channel, where Finn will be joined by Jackson Gross and anyone else from the crew who decides to stop by. As always, you can tune in at playback.tv/brewhoop, and if you need details on creating an account, here they are: