Milwaukee Bucks thriving while playing at breakneck pace
By Adam McGee
As the Milwaukee Bucks have put together a tremendous start to the 2019-20 season, they’ve done so while playing at an incredibly high pace.
Having compiled a 24-4 record to start the 2019-20 NBA campaign, there’s no shortage of elements to be impressed by when it comes to the play of the Milwaukee Bucks.
In taking a closer look at Milwaukee’s stats to this point in the season, it’s clear that the Bucks are currently tracking for their own slices of franchise, and even wider NBA, history in a variety of categories.
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One such area where the Bucks’ early season output is certainly shaping up to be a standout, at least in recent NBA history, comes in the form of the pace with which Mike Budenholzer’s team have been playing this season.
Through their first 28 games, the Bucks are leading the NBA in pace, behind a mark of 105.5 possessions per game. That leaves Milwaukee close to a full possession per game ahead of the second placed Washington Wizards, who are currently clocking in at 104.66.
Pace is up on the whole around the NBA this season, and if it sustains at its current level, the all-time record books may yet receive some notable entries from teams from 2019-20. With their current pace, both the Bucks and Wizards are on track to surpass last season’s high mark of 104.56, which was set by the Atlanta Hawks.
More widely, though, the Bucks find themselves positioned as a modern outlier when it comes to pace in a historical context.
A deeper dive into NBA history in terms of pace via Basketball Reference — who it’s worth noting evaluate pace using estimates for possession numbers, which deliver slightly different results to those found on stats.NBA.com — places the Bucks on track for a major breakthrough.
With Basketball-Reference’s pace mark for the Bucks to this point in the season set at 105.1, that leaves Milwaukee at 105th in terms of pace since the data began being tracked in the 1973-74 season. That may seem thoroughly underwhelming and unremarkable on the surface, but the trajectory of pace in the NBA during that period ensures it’s a very different story.
Although pace is currently on a major uptick around the league, there was a major downward trend in that regard from the early 1970s all the way through to 2000 that essentially reset the markers for what a team playing at pace really means.
With that in mind, Milwaukee’s 105th rank overall is actually the fastest pace since the turn of the millennium, and the second fastest since 1990 behind only the 1990-91 Denver Nuggets.
Therefore, not only has playing at pace worked for the Bucks to this point in the season, but it’s occurring while they’re setting standards in that category that haven’t been seen for the best part of 30 years.
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As the season progresses, how the Bucks’ pace of play continues to track with NBA history will remain worth monitoring.