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.

Q.1 – What word or phrase would you use to describe the Bucks’ basketball identity over the last four years?

Out of the 100 responses to this question, 39 different terms, ideas or phrases emerged as the suggested key to the Bucks’ identity.

Among the terms that proved popular among multiple respondents, the answers were no more definitive in terms of pointing to a recognizable and obvious identity.

The term most frequently suggested was inconsistent, which was the answer put forward by 16 of those who answered. Similarly, phrases like disorganized (9), mismanaged (5), self-sabotage (3) and untrustworthy (2) were among similar sentiments shared multiple times.

One of the most popular responses that suggested a slightly different perspective was Giannis. Nine respondents offered the name of the team’s star player as reflective of their identity over the past four years, perhaps pointing to another area of weakness too.

For as incredibly talented as Antetokounmpo is, it’s much more difficult to identify the ways in which the Bucks are hoping to best serve and support Giannis than it is to pick up the team’s blind reliance on him to perform. The Bucks will go as far as the Greek Freak can take them in the coming years, but that doesn’t mean Milwaukee shouldn’t be more structured in finding ways to help their star’s efforts.

One of the driving motivations behind the survey was to get a sense of if there was an ability among a larger sample of Bucks viewers to succinctly point to a basketball phrase to describe the team’s current identity. There were very few suggestions to fit that bill, but those that attempted to were telling.

The closest anyone gets to pinpointing Milwaukee’s overarching style as a team during that span, is with related responses of “mid-range” or “old school”, which was provided twice.

In an era when talk of “pace and space” is indicative of team identities being as clearly identifiable as ever, such a clearly defined identity evades the Bucks. Instead, Bucks fans are left to bemoan inconsistent results rather than any shape of well-intentioned process.

Q.2 – What do you consider to be the single biggest factor currently holding the Bucks back?

Respondents were offered multiple choices with coaching, roster, offense, defense, attitude/culture, and other (which required expanding upon the answer), all being proposed as potential factors holding Milwaukee back at present.

Unsurprisingly, and perhaps reassuringly, coaching emerged as a comfortable frontrunner with 54 percent of the vote. By the standard of Bucks fans, as evidenced by other answers from this survey, this is an impressively optimistic outcome.

With the Bucks set to undertake a wide-ranging coaching search in the offseason, the sentiment among the majority of the fans polled seems to be that much of Milwaukee’s issues could be rectified with the right coach at the helm.

Outside of that, only offense failed to receive a single vote. Defense, roster and attitude/culture shared a relatively even split of 11 percent, 12 percent and 13 percent respectively.

Other received 10 percent of the vote with the main sentiment shared being that the team’s problems were a combination of all of the above, with a couple of mentions for the influences of ownership and front office too.

Q.3 – Considering the current roster and performance levels, which NBA team past or present do you think the Bucks should be looking to emulate in the next stage of their development?

If the Bucks are failing to live up to expectations and hoping to take significant strides in the future, the obvious next question has to be what’s the template they should follow?

Much has been talked throughout the process of the Bucks’ current development of similarities with other NBA teams. Out of teams past and present, which teams should be held as the gold standard for Milwaukee’s next few years?

While it goes without saying that teams like the current crop of Golden State Warriors and LeBron James‘ Miami Heat team reliably received plenty of support, the overwhelming responses suggested a different kind of team.

The Tim Duncan-led San Antonio Spurs were the most popular suggestion of non-current NBA teams with 16 percent of voters selecting them, with notes being made about their consistency and longevity. For a team as wildly inconsistent as the Bucks are presently, and as a franchise undergoing a lengthy drought in terms of meaningful success, it’s no surprise that the Spurs hold a special appeal.

The kind of team-based system implemented in San Antonio seemed to get an even greater endorsement through some of the league’s best two-way teams at present. The most popular response overall was the current Toronto Raptors who earned 17 percent of the vote, while their Eastern Conference rival Boston Celtics picked up 12 percent.

While both of those teams contain incredibly talented rosters, building a roster with that level of ability shouldn’t be viewed as unattainable, particularly from a starting point that includes Antetokounmpo. Both the Raptors and Celtics are well-coached, highly competent on both ends of the floor and capable of overcoming any individual limitations with a strong collective effort in a well-defined system.

The Raptors, specifically, are even more interesting when considering how they’ve adjusted their approach from the end of last season to where it is now. Toronto built a more modern offense and retooled their defense over the span of a summer, leading them to being a top-five team on both ends of the floor.

Bucks fans seem to be hoping for a more team-focused approach that can be refined to maximize performance levels on both ends, and if the Bucks could do so with the speed of Toronto’s next step that would be even better again.

Q.4 – What do you believe the longer term potential of this current Bucks team COULD be, assuming realistic moves are made to address current weaknesses?

In spite of countless ups and downs not just across the last four years, but also within each of those seasons individually, I wanted to gauge how fans are currently feeling about the future.

Returning to a multiple choice format, respondents had the option of choosing between champions, perennial contenders, middle of the playoff pack, fringe playoff hopeful, or lottery as representative of the potential long-term future of the team.

The results suggest there’s still a confidence, albeit maybe not the ultimate confidence that everyone would have hoped for.

Perennial contenders was the clear leader with 56 percent of the vote, while 30 percent opted for champions and 13 percent view the Bucks as a middle of the pack playoff team at best. There was also a single pessimistic soul that thinks the best the Bucks can hope for with this current group is to be a fringe playoff team on an annual basis.

Although the end goal will always be winning a championship, there’s no shame in becoming a perennial contender. Attaining that status would leave the Bucks just one good move or fortunate break away from their ultimate goal, and that’s certainly far from a worst case scenario.

Q.5 – What do you believe the long term destiny of this Bucks team WILL be when all is said and done?

After getting a sense of what the 100 respondents believe the Bucks’ future could look like, the only stone left to be unturned was to find out how they think things will ultimately turn out for Milwaukee in the long term.

Multiple choice left those surveyed with options of multiple championships, one-time champions, perennial contenders, middle of the playoff pack, fringe playoff hopeful, or lottery bound after years of underachievement.

The result was a wider split than on most of the previous questions, as it’s clear that the Bucks’ future remains very much in flux.

The most popular response, with 31 percent of the vote, was that the Bucks would ultimately prove to be a middle of the pack playoff team, although it’s worth noting that it just edged out perennial contenders which received 30 percent of the vote.

In other words, 61 percent of respondents view the Bucks as likely to reside in the middle to higher echelons of the Eastern Conference in the coming years, without real conviction of them managing to break out beyond that.

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There were some optimists, as 26 percent believe the Bucks will win a single championship, with six percent going a step further in envisioning multiple rings. Beyond that, five percent see the Bucks petering out as a fringe playoff team, while two percent envision a grim future that ends with the Bucks in the lottery without anything to show for years of potential.