After last season ended in heartbreak, the Milwaukee Bucks have started the new season poorly, and may still be feeling the effects of their playoff woes.
My guess is that you’re very unlikely to hear anyone from inside the Milwaukee Bucks’ camp admit it, but after an underwhelming 2-2 start to the new campaign, last year’s No. 1 seed looks like a team that’s still reeling from how it all unraveled for them back in May.
As if you needed reminding, the Bucks’ playoff journey came to an end in the Eastern Conference Finals when a team that had prided itself on its resistance to consecutive defeats all season long lost four games in a row and was left to watch from the couch as the Toronto Raptors went on to win it all.
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That series, and the way in which it came apart for the Bucks, revealed schematic deficiencies and gameplan issues that the best teams could look to exploit. Most notably, that the Bucks’ offense lacked in variation and would grind to a halt if forced to explore contingencies.
As the new season has begun, and the Bucks have suffered losses to the Heat and Celtics, some evidence of that issue has presented itself again.
When the Bucks hit a roadblock, the ball stops moving, the players stop moving, the volume of questionable three-point attempts increases, and Giannis Antetokounmpo finds increasingly less joy on his attempts to get his usual glut of points at the rim.
Having said that, what perhaps wasn’t apparent when a team of Toronto’s caliber was forcing the Bucks into those various uncomfortable positions was just how easily Milwaukee could inflict those own issues on themselves against lesser opponents too.
Through four games, the Bucks’ problems have all been of their own making. The dominance in the first halves against Miami and Boston demonstrated just what the Bucks can be at their best, and the second halves offered up a more troubling glimpse of what can happen when this Bucks’ team once again feels like its plan suddenly isn’t working.
That isn’t a sensation they really had to deal with at all last season until it was too late and Toronto had rolled off four straight wins. Prior to that point, stumbles, such as the one suffered in Game 1 against the Celtics, were just that and moved on from and righted immediately with minimal fuss.
Cumulatively, that provided the Bucks with an air of the invincible. With 60 wins, and the best record in the NBA, and victories against all of their major rivals over the course of the year, Milwaukee could deservedly believe their own hype, and buy into the notion that they really could be the league’s most dominant team.
That was a new place for the players, certainly a new place for most fans, and it fueled an unfamiliar yet intoxicating belief. The kind that allowed the Bucks to turn the screw on opponents and be on the right side of big comeback wins.
With that playoff disappointment, though, that confidence was shattered. That’s not to say it was all an illusion, that the Bucks were never at that level to begin with, or that they won’t be there again, but it does point to the fact that the psyche of Mike Budenholzer’s Bucks changed in that defeat, possibly forever.
Therefore, as we start the new season, we’re watching a team that was just getting used to being great, now having to adjust to their own vulnerability. They are far from infallible, just like every other team in the league.
With that change comes doubt, and the kind of anxiety that almost certainly doesn’t help to steady the ship when a once 20-point lead is suddenly only a 10-point lead, and then has disappeared entirely.
The prospect of following up last year was always going to be difficult for the Bucks. There’s nothing straightforward about wanting to avenge a playoff letdown, and yet finding yourself with 82 games to work through first, and against opponents who’ve now seen you bleed.
Milwaukee has the ability, both with their roster and their coaching staff, to come through all of this sooner than would now seem possible and to resume what could be deemed as normal service relative to how they played last season.
If that’s to happen, though, it may not be quite as dependent on overcoming some of the Xs and Os issues that will be considerably more important in a playoff setting than in a regular season setting. Instead, it may well hinge on the team’s collective mentality and confidence.
As the Bucks spend Halloween reflecting on a second ugly loss of this very early season, they could do with exorcising the playoff demons that clearly still linger in their minds.