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The Milwaukee Bucks are hiring veteran NBA coach Doc Rivers, league sources said Wednesday, a day after the team fired first-year coach Adrian Griffin.
Rivers, 62, began working as an informal consultant to Griffin in December at the Bucks’ urging. The team quickly came to terms with Rivers after moving on from Griffin after just 43 games.
With a 30-13 record and two superstar talents in Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard, the Bucks are still in the middle of a season that the organization believes can end in a championship. With that in mind, Milwaukee general manager Jon Horst needed to find a replacement for Griffin who could keep the team moving toward its goal.
Ideally, the Bucks would find someone with significant coaching experience, championship pedigree and enough gravitas in coaching superstar talent to take over as first-time head coach in Griffin. With 24 seasons of coaching experience and an NBA championship in 2008 with the Boston Celtics, Rivers checked all those boxes and Milwaukee was aggressive in pursuing him as their coach.
Rivers, who previously coached the Orlando Magic, Celtics, Los Angeles Clippers and Philadelphia 76ers, has not had a losing year since 2007. His streak is the fourth-longest in league history behind Hall of Famers from the basketball Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson and Pat Riley. .
Rivers has a 1,097-763 record in his 24 seasons as coach and has only missed the playoffs five times. He signed with ESPN as a lead commentator alongside Doris Burke and Mike Breen in July 2023 after a three-year stint with the 76ers from 2020 to 2023. He won the NBA Coach of the Year award in 2000 with the Magic.
Rivers was selected in the second round of the 1983 NBA Draft by the Atlanta Hawks. He played the first eight seasons of his 13-year NBA career in Atlanta and is the team’s all-time assists leader with 3,866. Rivers had 4,889 regular season assists during his career.
He also played one season with the Clippers, one with the New York Knicks and two with the San Antonio Spurs to complete his time in the NBA.
The Bucks job is a homecoming of sorts for Rivers, who graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee. Rivers, a Chicago native, played three seasons at Marquette from 1980 to 1983 and the university retired his No. 31 in 2004.
Why leave Griffin?
While the Bucks had gone 30-13 in their first 43 games this season, they weren’t showing enough growth as the season passed the halfway mark. While they were able to go 6-5 in January under Griffin, Milwaukee had a brutal start to the new year defensively, giving up 122.1 points per 100 possessions. Instead of showing signs of growth while trying new defensive ideas, the Bucks were regressing and put together their worst defensive month of the season.
On the other side of the floor, the results have been much better with Milwaukee currently second in offensive rating, scoring 120.5 points per 100 possessions, but the offense simply hasn’t looked cohesive to this point. Instead of putting together an offensive attack that multiplied the skills of Antetokounmpo and Lillard, the team’s superstar duo ended up taking turns on the offensive end.
It has been successful thanks to the team’s spectacular offensive talent, but the offense still has significant potential to do even more.
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