Can a rejuvenated Lillard save the desperate Bucks?

With the 2024-25 campaign approaching, we're diving deep into some of the players we're most interested in watching. First up: an aging superstar trying to give a fading contender one last kick at the can.

There are plenty of explanations for why the Milwaukee Bucks underachieved last season, be it lousy perimeter defense, a misbegotten schematic overhaul, poor communication from the sidelines that led to a midseason coaching change, a lack of functional depth, or the fact that their two best players were sidelined or hobbled in the playoffs.

But the most salient reason is that Damian Lillard, for whom the Bucks exchanged Jrue Holiday and basically all of their remaining tradeable draft assets on the eve of training camp, wasn't quite the offensive powerhouse his new team needed him to be, nor the one he'd been for the previous decade in Portland.

By his lofty standards, Lillard had a down year as a 3-point shooter and struggled from the mid-range. He drove the ball less often and less effectively than in recent seasons, posting the lowest rim frequency of his career. He had his least efficient pick-and-roll scoring season in eight years. For those reasons and others, the two-man game between him and Giannis Antetokounmpo never fully clicked, though it steadily improved after an especially bumpy start. For Milwaukee, swapping Holiday for Lillard meant accepting a significant defensive downgrade, and the team's offense didn't improve enough to compensate.

The big question heading into another pressure-packed campaign is whether that down year represented an outlier or Lillard's new baseline. Lillard has insisted it was the former, citing a combination of lifestyle upheaval (moving cities for the first time in his career), the short runway to get acclimated before the start of the season, and personal issues behind the scenes. He also just turned 34, so age-related decline can't be ruled out, even if he had arguably the best season of his career the year before.

Milwaukee can only hope that Lillard is right and a bounceback is coming.

There are a few other factors that can nudge the Bucks toward the higher end of their range of potential outcomes, including better injury luck in the playoffs, a healthier campaign from Khris Middleton overall, a slight upgrade from Malik Beasley to Gary Trent Jr. at the fifth starter spot, and a full season with someone other than Adrian Griffin at the helm. But those factors alone won't push them back to the front of a suddenly crowded group of Eastern Conference contenders. As of now, it's hard to slot Milwaukee ahead of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. If the Lillard of 2022-23 reappears, though, it's a different story. His performance stands as one of the most important variables not only for the Bucks but for the whole league.

On the plus side, a disappointing season still saw Lillard average 24.3 points and seven assists on above-average efficiency while piling up free throws and remaining a crunch-time assassin. The Bucks outscored opponents by 16.6 points per 100 possessions in 677 minutes with him, Antetokounmpo, Middleton, and Brook Lopez on the floor together. And they pushed a quality Pacers team in the first round despite Antetokounmpo sitting out the whole series and Lillard aggravating an Achilles injury that caused him to miss Games 4 and 5 before returning hobbled for Game 6.

We still glimpsed some vintage Dame Time transcendence in that series, including a 35-point first half in Game 1. He averaged a ludicrous 1.46 points per possession as a pick-and-roll ball-handler in the four games he played. He didn't get a proper offseason last year, and having one now could help him further develop his offensive partnership with Antetokounmpo. He already has great pick-and-roll chemistry with Lopez.

The Bucks have as much riding on the 2024-25 campaign as any team in the NBA. They've sacrificed every ounce of future capital and every shred of financial flexibility to win big right now. And their core is aging. Lopez remains Milwaukee's defensive backbone - and was often the only thing keeping the team halfway decent at that end last season - but he'll turn 37 in the spring. Middleton is 33, and injuries have cost him 76 games over the last two seasons.

Antetokounmpo is still in his prime heading into his age-30 campaign, and his offensive game is as potent as ever, but his defense is slipping. This is also the last year before his gargantuan extension kicks in; he and Lillard alone will make $127 million (or approximately 82% of the projected salary cap) in 2025-26. The second apron looms as an impediment to augmenting or even sustaining the team around them.

There's a reason the Bucks' front office has been acting with so much urgency, a reason they deemed it necessary to trade a player as beloved as Holiday, to fire a coach as successful as Mike Budenholzer, and to fire his replacement just a half-season into his tenure, despite the team being 30-13 at the time. If Antetokounmpo is going to win another ring in Milwaukee, it sure feels like now or never. And if it's going to be now, he'll need everything his co-star has to give.

Lillard hasn't faced that kind of pressure before. He obviously dealt with pressure in Portland, where the Blazers were heavily dependent on his nightly production just to stay respectable, but this is different; expectations are in a whole other stratosphere now. This might well be the most important season of his Hall of Fame career. That makes him undoubtedly one of the most interesting players to watch in 2024-25.

Joe Wolfond covers the NBA for theScore