Every year at Brew Hoop, as a preface to the season, we run a “Ranking the Roster” series, where we go through everyone on the team and rank them as an asset, taking into account a player’s age, production, contract, upside, etc. One of the primary reasons this exercise started was the relatively low-rate of success for the Milwaukee Bucks. Anyone who was considered a quality asset would be integral to helping this team take the next step, or someone who could be leveraged to flip and acquire an asset that could send this team closer to where they hoped to land: with an NBA championship.

In the intervening years, this franchise has finally landed the superstar they sorely needed in Giannis Antetokounmpo, and surrounded him with a couple of max-level players in Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday. Giannis and Khris has routinely taken the top spot in this exercise the last few years, and with good reason. Today, the Milwaukee Bucks are a franchise where the fans have legitimate championship aspirations, and anything less is considered a disappointment. For the vast majority of the past 50 years, that was not the case.

As such, we’re going to change up this exercise a little bit for this year. Rather than ranking each of these players as assets, we’re going to try and rank them in terms of importance to the Bucks achieving a championship this season. There’s been a lot of discussion this offseason by Bucks leadership about trying to find talent that will translate from the regular season to the postseason, and there are plenty of new faces around to try and rank in terms of how they’ll perform come May, June and July.

So, you’ll be asked to rank these players in terms of how you think they’ll eventually factor in for this team’s postseason success. Whatever they do in the regular season is a bonus, but shouldn’t be the motivating factor in your mind as you fill out these polls.

The other change we’re making is due to the compressed NBA offseason. While normally we rank each player individually from 1-15 (1-14 this year), unfortunately we don’t quite have the time to commit to such a lengthy exercise with preseason and the regular season rapidly approaching. Instead, we’re going to group players positionally and you’ll be asked to rank them in terms of importance from there. Here’s how we broke those groups down:

Guards

• D.J. Augustin
• Pat Connaughton
• Donte DiVincenzo
• Jrue Holiday
• Sam Merrill

Wings

• Thanasis Antetokounmpo
• Torrey Craig
• Bryn Forbes
• Khris Middleton
• Jordan Nwora

Bigs

• Giannis Antetokounmpo
• Brook Lopez
• Bobby Portis
• D.J. Wilson

Hopefully next year we can return to the all-out, player-by-player format of this exercise, but this seemed like a decent compromise to ensure this annual piece could continue. We’ve decided not to include the two-way players as well, mostly because this is focusing so strongly upon postseason play, where the chance of Jaylen Adams and Mamadi Diakite being critical to a championship seems close to nil. The other benefit of doing this now is re-evaluating after the regular season and postseason to see how accurately our preseason expectations mirrored reality.

Because our usual polling technology doesn’t have the ability to rank multiple players within one exercise, we’re going to be conducting this via Google Forms. While you won’t be able to see the results in real-time, we’ll post full results in our next article in the series. Here’s a screenshot of how it would look; you’ll need to fill out one player each for most important to least important:

First up are the guards. Please rank them in terms of most important to least important to the Bucks hopeful playoff performance.

Click here to fill out the poll

You’ll have until midnight on Tuesday, December 8 to fill this out before we pull results.