MILWAUKEE — Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers claims there is nothing to a report from ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith that suggested the veteran head coach plans to retire after this season.
“No, I’m not getting into that,” Rivers said when asked about Smith’s claim after Friday’s practice. “That’s something that; I think he feels that way, but not for me.”
During Smith’s SiriusXM radio show on Wednesday, a caller suggested that Rivers would be the right coach for Memphis Grizzlies point guard Ja Morant, and a trade to Milwaukee might be a way to revitalize Morant’s career. In response, Smith claimed that Rivers was retiring after this season.
“It’s not gonna be Doc Rivers because Doc Rivers is gonna retire at the end of this season,” Smith told the caller. “Doc Rivers has been coaching for close to 25 years, this is it for him. He’s gonna step away.”
Rivers is under contract with the Bucks through the 2026-27 season. This is Rivers’ 25th full season as a head coach and the 27th different season in which he has served as an NBA coach overall.
Rivers has compiled a 1,188-851 record with five different teams and surpassed George Karl for sixth all-time on the regular-season head coaching wins list earlier this season. The 64-year-old is only 22 wins behind Pat Riley for fifth on that list and he is a finalist for induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
While Rivers has won a majority of his regular-season games and won an NBA championship with the Boston Celtics in 2008, his stint with the Bucks has not been as successful as the organization would have hoped when they hired him to replace first-time head coach Adrian Griffin midway through the 2023-24 season.
As of Friday afternoon, the Bucks (26-35) are in 11th place in the Eastern Conference and five games behind the Atlanta Hawks and Charlotte Hornets, who occupy the final two spots in the East’s Play-In tournament.
Two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo has missed 29 of the Bucks’ 61 games, but even with him in the lineup, the Bucks haven’t been able to find a successful formula and appear destined to come up short of expectations for a third straight season.
The Bucks are 23rd in offensive rating and 25th in defensive rating this season, per NBA.com. With Antetokounmpo out for half of the season, the Bucks’ offensive struggles make some sense. The Bucks entered the year planning to build their offensive identity around Antetokounmpo’s ability to draw help defenders, but the defensive struggles are more difficult to explain.
“Just keep looking,” Rivers said on Friday when asked how to fix the defense’s struggles this late in the season. “Defensively, we just haven’t been where I obviously thought that we would be. A lot of that is Giannis has been out of the lineup, but the defensive numbers don’t change when Giannis is in or out.
“We’re 25th either way, which is not a good sign. We don’t force turnovers. We give up a ton of 3s and we give up 3s when the ball doesn’t get into the paint. That’s a concern, and that should never happen.”
If the Bucks continue on this pace, it would be Rivers’ first full season as a head coach with a losing record since the 2006-07 season with the Celtics and the first time the Bucks have missed the playoffs since the 2015-16 season. With Rivers as head coach over the last two-and-a-half seasons, the Bucks have posted a 91-88 record in the regular season. They were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Indiana Pacers in each of Rivers’ first two seasons.
