Milwaukee Bucks: What can be learned from last year’s Celtics series?

With their rematch set in the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals, can the Milwaukee Bucks learn anything from their loss in last year’s playoff series against the Boston Celtics?

After calmly sweeping the Detroit Pistons in the first round, the Milwaukee Bucks are preparing to take on a familiar playoff foe in the Boston Celtics during the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals.

The upcoming series, which is set to tip off early Sunday afternoon at Fiserv Forum, gives the Bucks a chance at revenge, after the Celtics ended Milwaukee’s season last year on their famed parquet floor in a 112-96 Game 7 win (in a nice bit of symmetry, Game 1 will be played exactly one year on from that Game 7 loss for the Bucks).

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Anyone who has simply followed the Bucks all year long, even in a casual sense, knows that there are very few things with this year’s 60-win squad that resemble last year’s underwhelming iteration.

Of course, that starts at the top with head coach Mike Budenholzer and his staff hitting all of the right notes while molding this Bucks team into title contenders.

While the team’s core pieces such as superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton and Eric Bledsoe remain intact, more than half of the Bucks’ roster were either elsewhere around the league or hard at work preparing for the following season.

That’s quite a distinction to note when heading into the series, especially when compared to a Celtics team that remains largely unchanged from last year, save for both Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving being healthy this time around. With all that in mind, is there anything the Bucks can take from last year’s series heading into this year’s grudge match?

Surely, the year-long sting of a playoff loss will still stick with those that went the full tilt, only to fall short again and prolong the Bucks’ near-two decade long playoff series drought that has since been squashed, thankfully.

Individually, the motivation of wanting to redeem what stands as a career-low moment will likely resonate with Eric Bledsoe, which my colleague Adam McGee brilliantly explored earlier this week.

But the weight of experiencing such a blow clearly irked Khris Middleton, who easily played some of his best basketball of his six-year Bucks career during the seven-game series. For a reminder, this is what Middleton said regarding the series in a profile written by Eric Nehm last summer:

"“That series still doesn’t sit well with me, even though I had a hell of a series that we lost,” Middleton said. “Last year was supposed to be our year where we get past the first round and see what happens after the first round. And we still couldn’t do it. It still doesn’t sit well with me. I felt like I played great, but, to me, at the end of the day, I don’t feel like I did enough to actually win. It just keeps stabbing me this summer.”"

If anything, the sentiment Middleton shared that he felt he didn’t do enough in order to secure the series win may illuminate the biggest contrast to how the Bucks have gone about managing this season under Budenholzer.

Despite Middleton having the series of his life and Antetokounmpo burdened with such a herculean workload on his broad shoulders all year long under suboptimal circumstances, there’s now a clear identity and cohesion that was absent throughout all facets of the Bucks’ season last year.

Perhaps Bucks wing Pat Connaughton said it best when speaking on the differences to this year’s matchup compared to last season’s meeting as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Matt Velazquez relayed following Thursday afternoon’s practice:

"“This is a different team than last year, but at the same time, it never hurts to have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder from last year based off how that series went,” he said. “Obviously the media, the fans, Boston fans, Milwaukee fans they’ll have a good time playing that up and having a little added edge to it, but for us it’s about making sure we stay together, we stick together as this team and make sure to continue to play the way we’ve been playing all year and not let things from last year creep in.”"

The Bucks have proven to this point in their season that they’re no longer the team that buckles under the weight of expectations as they had done previously. While the road to the Finals runs through Fiserv Forum for everyone else, the Bucks’ own road to potentially earning a shot at this year’s title runs through the place where we last saw their former selves.