The NBA world has been rocked by the harsh punishment that the league issued to the Los Angeles Clippers after a nearly year long investigation into salary cap circumvention, the clippers aren’t the only team who has to worry about this kind of punishment.

The Milwaukee Bucks are currently under investigation for cap circumvention themselves, although due to very different circumstances than the ones that surrounded the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard.

When the Buck signed guard Gary Trent Jr. to a four-year, $64 million earlier this offseason, the exact figures to that deal raised some major alarm bells.

On paper it simply looked like Trent Jr. was massively overpaid to a degree with baffled not only Bucks fans, but NBA experts as well.

But the degree to which Trent Jr. was overpaid, even prompted the NBA to launch investigation into the MBA to see if there was more to the contract than simply an inflated salary. 

When Trent Junior initially joined the Bucks in 2024,  he was a productive member of the team that seemed like a welcome addition to the Bucks roster, so when he re-signed with the Bucks on a two-year, $7.58 million contract, it seemed like he was underpaid at the time.

What the NBA is investigating now is whether Trent Jr. agreed to that initially low contract so that the Bucks would have more cap space to sign free agents around Giannis Antetokounmpo under the agreement that Trent Jr. would be paid back his missed salary in a larger contract later on.

Should the NBA’s investigation reveal that this was the case, the Bucks could be in for a world of hurt. 

Per a report from The Athletic, the Bucks could be punished as severely as the Clippers were, if not more, should they be found guilty. 

This could be even more devastating for the Bucks than it was for the Clippers if so. Both teams are in the infancy of a rebuilding process, but the Bucks are in a far more fragile state than the Clippers are when it comes to that process. 

Los Angeles had at least accumulated a surplus of first round picks before they were stripped of five of them, so the loss was far more palatable. 

The Bucks, on the other hand, could lose out on their entire first round draft capital through at least 2033 if they’re met with a similar punishment. 

The Bucks also have a far smaller pool of young talent than the Clippers do to work with, so any kind of setback could seriously derail the progress of the organization.

The NBA made an example out of the Clippers with their punishment and soon enough the Bucks may be following in that example.