Today, we’ll be trading with the Milwaukee Bucks. This is the trade we’ll do:
Nothing crazy here. Middleton would have been an incredible get 2-3 years ago but not today. My hope is simply that the wings we got from Milwaukee don’t regress too bad while we see some improvements from other parts of our roster.
Middleton actually gets better at the start of next season, but sadly, he’s one of just a few bright spots. This is our team at the end of the season:
We end up doing much better than I expected, finishing with our first 60-win season of these sims. Embiid and Harden played all 82 games and played stellar in them. As team, we finished with the best offense in the league and the tenth best defense. Though we have the NBA’s best record, that’s far from a guarantee that we’ll win it all.
We end up in a first-round matchup with the same Milwaukee team we traded with, and it turns out to be a dogfight. Milwaukee wins the first two games of the series on the road, but we tie the series up with two road wins of our own. Giannis Antetokounmpo gets 51/19/10 to carry the Bucks to win in Game 5, and Embiid gets 53 points, 15 rebounds, and 6 blocks in an overtime win over Milwaukee in Game 6. Now we’re in a Game 7 with arguably the two best players in the league. The road team has won the first six games, while the last four have been decided by single digits. It’s more of the same in Game 7 as Milwaukee beats us by 3 and goes on to lose to Memphis in the Finals. Just burn it all down.
