Ranking the Roster: Milwaukee Bucks' Player Value - An Introduction

You're probably familiar with Bill Simmons' annual NBA Trade Value column. If not, here's the final part of last year's iteration, and here's the NFL variation courtesy of Bill Barnwell. Those lists are part science, part art, and very much up for debate. It's difficult to come up with a conclusive ranking of player values in either sport, since individual performance is so heavily influenced by teammates, coaching, systems, and sheer luck. But generally speaking, the progressions make sense, even when taking into account all the varied considerations people might want to include: age, salary, locker room presence, and so on.

They're fun lists to put together, if only because its easy to get off and running thinking about whether the Thunder really would ship out Russell Westbrook in exchange for Stephen Curry or Kyrie Irving or whoever you want. So surely it would be fun to do a similar thing, but restricting the list to only players on the Milwaukee Bucks! Right? Right!

That's what we're asking from you, readers. Similar to our NBA Draft Big Board, we're going to use this series of posts to count down the "value" of every player on the Bucks' roster, starting from the bottom. Because it's a little strange to think about "trade value" relative only to players on the same team, think of it this way: Imagine the NBA was having an expansion draft tomorrow, and the Bucks were able to protect their entire roster from being pilfered, only unprotecting players one at a time. Who would be the first guy you'd let go? Who would you protect the longest? That's what we want to know. Here are the general guidelines from Simmons' trade value post, which might help you when mulling over these rankings.

• Contracts matter, at least to whatever extent you think salary concerns are an issue for Milwaukee. Think like a GM.
• We're not just ranking the team for immediate value, so consider the long-term implications of losing each individual player in addition to short-term impact.

So with that, the first voting session is open! I've set out a few options in the first poll, hopefully including all the players who might reasonably be ranked lowest in this scenario. I left out the handful of guys who are generally accepted to be the Bucks' most valuable assets because I ain't dealing with no poll trolls. As always you can write-in a player in the comments, but you will likely be ridiculed if you do so this early. Consider yourself warned, jokesters.