Milwaukee Bucks: Will there be an adjustment period to start the season?

As Milwaukee Bucks fans prepare for the team’s first season under Mike Budenholzer, a potential adjustment period shouldn’t be overlooked.

With the release of the full schedule for the 2018-19 NBA season in recent days, it’s easy for Milwaukee Bucks fans to start looking ahead and getting excited.

Sure, the opening stretch includes some talented opponents, but are there really any teams the Bucks couldn’t beat in there? After all, with the crippling schemes of the previous coaching regime now behind them, the Bucks are set to take a major jump, right?

The answer to that second question is likely yes. The Bucks should be markedly improved in the upcoming season thanks to their overhaul of the coaching staff, and also fueled by the improvements made around the fringes of the roster throughout the course of the summer.

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What that doesn’t mean, though, is that it’s all going to be smooth sailing. After all, this is still the Bucks, so major bumps in the road should be expected.

The form in which those obstacles present themselves could be very different under Budenholzer — maybe the best way of putting it is they should be less of the Bucks’ own creation — but there’s certainly one challenge that Milwaukee’s players will have to overcome if they’re to settle into a pattern of routine and convincing victories throughout the course of the year.

Put simply, the Bucks have years of bad habits to break and a very different style of basketball to adjust to.

Budenholzer and his trusted assistants are essentially guaranteed to opt for a defensive strategy which remains focused on leveraging the advantage of Milwaukee’s impressive length, yet it will need to be much more subtle, and much more restrained. It’s too big of an assumption to make to imagine that transition being entirely seamless.

Likewise, although the Bucks have always been willing passers on the offensive end, they’ll have to learn to be more purposeful in their ball-movement, and most importantly abandon their former static ways in favor of off-ball movement too. Taking more three-pointers and spacing out the offense will be the focus, but the process involved in doing so starts with adjustments of its own too.

Training camp will be jam-packed with new experiences and lessons to be absorbed for the Bucks, and the reality is it will likely require significant game repetitions for the messages and the philosophy to fully sink in.

With preseason cut back to just four games, it’s hard to imagine the Bucks won’t still be learning on the fly as the season opens up. That’s not unusual in the NBA considering the high volume of roster and coaching turnover, and it’s not to say it presents a storm that can’t be weathered either.

What it does mean is the overall journey for the new-look Bucks is likely going to take some time.

Milwaukee could still look good and rack up wins early in the year behind the individual talent of Giannis Antetokounmpo and his supporting cast of Khris Middleton, Eric Bledsoe, Malcolm Brogdon and Brook Lopez, but the overall team approach hitting its peak and reaping its greatest rewards may require just a little more patience.

None of this should significantly temper expectations for the Bucks, and in fact there’s a strong case to be made for the opposite effect to come into play.

Milwaukee should start the season capable of performing at a similar level to last season, but within the framework of a much more coherent system. That should instantly lead to improvement. Where the real cause for excitement comes from is in the prospect of the team evolving as the year progresses, though.

That wasn’t really a factor throughout Jason Kidd‘s tenure, but while it might take some time for the Bucks to truly resemble a Budenholzer-coached team, Milwaukee’s ceiling will be infinitely higher than it’s been for a long, long time when that day eventually arrives.

There’s no guarantee the Bucks will take off and never look back once the season begins, but major improvement is certainly in the pipeline, and by the time the 2018-19 season wraps up, the perception of the Milwaukee Bucks around the NBA could well be changed entirely.