Milwaukee Bucks: An ongoing case of missing identity

As the Milwaukee Bucks approach the end of another turbulent and eventful season, it remains just as difficult to pin down the team’s identity.

It’s been an incredibly busy four years for the Milwaukee Bucks.

During that time, a new ownership group took charge, construction of a new arena was green-lit, a G League franchise was purchased, Jason Kidd was hired and fired, Giannis Antetokounmpo developed into an All-NBA caliber star, Jabari Parker tore his ACL twice, and the Bucks made a variety of major splashes in the trade market and free agency.

That remains as a highly condensed list of the events of an incredibly important period of change and growth for the Bucks, yet as important as organizational and infrastructural developments are, in the grander scheme it’s always a team’s performance and approach on the court that are most easily remembered by the fans.

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In that regard, the Bucks have a problem. The results have certainly been mixed, but beyond that it’s even more difficult to define who the Bucks have been during that time, or what exactly they’ve been trying to do on the court.

While lip service has been paid to a defense-first approach, particularly under Jason Kidd, the team’s struggles on that end of the floor since the conclusion of the 2014-15 season make that notion farcical.

On offense, the Bucks have generally been improvisational in the worst possible sense. The onus has frequently been put on the players to create offense in a more instinctive fashion than is now commonplace in the NBA, and the result has generally been closer to a jumbled mess than any form of free jazz.

All of this combines to highlight a complete absence of identity — an issue that has arguably been the biggest factor in Milwaukee’s ups and downs over the past four seasons.

While terms like length and youth are nice shorthand ways to describe Milwaukee’s roster, they give little insight into how those long, young players are being utilized. The Bucks have a marketing identity, but not a basketball equivalent.

After a March 14 loss to the Orlando Magic, a contender for the season’s lowest point for Milwaukee, this felt more evident than ever.

The Bucks were more talented, healthier and better-rested than their opponent, with considerably greater motivation to win, and yet they were still picked apart behind a listless performance. Giannis Antetokounmpo performed like the superstar he is, and the Bucks were still humiliated.

Following that game, I let out a mini tweet storm about what I was seeing from the team (an increasingly common occurrence this season), and it inspired me to dig a little deeper.

Rather than taking my own word for it, I put together a survey of five questions to get a flavor of what a greater variety of Bucks fans think of the identity of this current team.

In total, after sharing the survey on Twitter, there were 114 respondents. To keep in line with my original thought, I gathered the first 100 responses and took a closer look at the results.

Before we get to them, it’s important to keep a couple of considerations in mind.

• This is a survey of 100 people who responded voluntarily on Twitter, not the entire fanbase.
• Recency bias is virtually guaranteed to have influenced these results as the past month has certainly not been Milwaukee’s best.
• Surveys generally, and this one in particular are far from a science. It was designed to get a sense of the general feeling around the team’s recent past, present and future, and the direction or lack of direction that has featured on the court during that time.