Milwaukee Bucks: Road trip offering rare glimpse of adversity

The Milwaukee Bucks’ current road trip has been far from a smooth run for the league’s best team and we’ve seen different blueprints and executions in how to slow them down as a result.

Standing at 33-6 on the season, and the best team in the NBA by a considerable margin, the Milwaukee Bucks near the halfway mark this year as a fixture of consistency.

Of course, fashioning an 18-game winning streak helped the Bucks breeze by the competition as well as boost their incredible point differential (11.8) and their lapses have come fewer and far between than in any Bucks season, especially in recent memory.

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With that said, their current road trip against Western Conference opponents has given the Bucks an extended stretch where they’ll have to resolve some issues that have led to their play falling well short of the lofty standards they’ve set for themselves, especially under head coach Mike Budenholzer.

It all started on Monday night where the Bucks suffered their biggest defeat of the season to the San Antonio Spurs in a 126-104 loss.

As evidenced by the win, San Antonio gave the Bucks one of the best performances we’ve seen from an opponent this season, all of which was exemplified by their sterling shooting performance where they shot 51.1 percent from the field went 19-of-35 from beyond the arc (54.3 percent).

And as we’ve seen in the rare games when their offense is tougher to come by, the Bucks’ top-ranked defense is largely nowhere to be found and the Bucks had a 129.9 defensive rating, the highest mark they’ve had in a single game this season, per NBA.com/stats.

But digging deeper, there are issues that illustrate just how the Spurs were able to take the Bucks away from playing their game. For starters, it matches their Christmas Day loss to the Philadelphia 76ers and their momentous win over the Los Angeles Lakers last month as the slowest games the Bucks have played this season where they registered a 97.5 pace.

While the Bucks were able to peel out in transition to give them some much needed, easy buckets, as evidenced by their 22 fast break points, the Spurs’ engaged defense and head coach Gregg Popovich’s dedication to calling timeouts any time superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo saw a silver of space to the rim threw the Bucks off their usual rhythm.

The Warriors followed suit with a very similar strategy in regard to defending Antetokounmpo Wednesday night, although they obviously weren’t as successful as the Spurs were previously. Golden State’s decision to wall off the paint from the reigning MVP isn’t a revolutionary tactic at this point, nor was their execution all that crisp as Antetokounmpo still finished with 30 points on the night, 16 of which came via the painted area.

However, it was Antetokounmpo’s and the Bucks’ collective 3-point struggles, as they went 9-of-41 from that range of the floor, that truly hamstrung them on the night and made a win over the depleted Warriors that much harder than was expected. It resulted in the 22 3-point percentage mark they tallied for the game, which was the second-lowest efficiency they’ve had for a contest so far.

And it continues to show that despite the many strides that the 25-year-old has made this season as he’s shooting 31.9 percent on a career-high 5.2 attempts per game, opposing teams will be more than happy to see Antetokounmpo launch from long distance compared to striding toward the cup.

The same may very well apply to seeing Antetokounmpo head to the free throw line in close games for hack-a-Giannis situations as Warriors head coach Steve Kerr turned to before the two-minute mark, although recent rule changes have cut down on such scenarios. And Antetokounmpo went 1-for-2 from the foul line at the 2:06 mark in the fourth quarter when Kerr turned to that strategy.

Even with the recent tests that Antetokounmpo has passed on some nights this season where he’s lived at the free throw line, even more than his usual average of 10.3 free throw attempts per game, shooting a career-worst 61.8 percent from the charity stripe will give teams ammunition to find holes in Antetokounmpo’s vast arsenal of extraordinary talents.

All of it adds to the blueprint for how Milwaukee’s opponents will continue fine tuning a strategy to take them down as the season moves along and especially come playoff time.

The Bucks have an established identity that’s only leaned further into the habits and areas that Budenholzer preached over his first season with the Bucks. Other title contenders such as the Los Angeles Lakers and L.A. Clippers have dealt with significant offseason changes and obviously are better for it, yet it’s the Bucks that are the closest thing to a known quantity in the NBA at the moment.

But the lasting memory of the Bucks’ Conference Finals collapse last season will fuel the criticism that casts them as a “regular season” team and the drum will be beaten louder and louder as we inch closer to the postseason, and if the Bucks stumble in high-profile clashes and tighter games.

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For now, the Bucks will bounce back and fight through this midseason malaise and continue trying to overcome any wrinkles and strategies that their opponents will turn to in order to slow them down on their league-leading pace. All the while, the bigger, franchise-changing questions will quietly lurk in the background.

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