Milwaukee Bucks: This year’s playoffs could be different for Eric Bledsoe

After his major struggles have hurt the Milwaukee Bucks come playoff time in the last two years, things could be different for Eric Bledsoe this season.

If the NBA season resumes in Orlando in just over three weeks from now, it’s going to be very different to anything that the players have previously experienced in their professional careers. Nothing will feel more entirely new than the playoffs, though.

For most teams, including the Milwaukee Bucks, so much of the focus surrounding the strange environment that games will be played in on the Walt Disney World Resort campus has zeroed in on the potential negative effects of the changes.

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It’s certainly in play that, for some players, there could be real positives too.

Chief among those candidates for the Bucks may well be starting point guard Eric Bledsoe.

In his two postseason campaigns with the Bucks to date, Bledsoe’s standard of performance has plummeted, proving incredibly costly to Milwaukee in series that were lost by the narrowest of margins.

For whatever reason, the moment the playoffs get underway, Bledsoe becomes an entirely different player, and not in any positive capacity.

That should offer up at least a level of intrigue, if not outright hope, as to how Bledsoe might perform in the upcoming playoffs, though. As a result of everything being different leading up to and surrounding the game, it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to imagine Bledsoe entering games in a different place, mentally.

With an entirely new and different environment for the postseason, the Milwaukee Bucks might finally see an improved version of Eric Bledsoe in the playoffs.

The lengthy hiatus that the coronavirus stoppage forced on the NBA in recent months will mean that Bledsoe should enter the playoffs considerably fresher than he has in the past two seasons. That doesn’t just speak to his physical health, but also his mental sharpness too. Rather than a natural fatigue that can come from the end of a grueling campaign, all players should receive a jolt of energy and enthusiasm at the prospect of returning to competition, and that should only be more true for the Bucks as they get to finish out what was shaping up to be a very special season.

Diving even deeper, the atmosphere across the three arenas where games will be played in Orlando will be sterile — the NBA will hope that proves to be particularly true in the most literal sense of cleanliness. Bledsoe stands out as exactly the kind of player that could receive a boost from that.

While players won’t be able to feed off fans for positive energy, neither will they suffer from fans getting on their back in a road game like they could under normal circumstances.

For someone like Bledsoe, although there will be pressure to bounce back after any poor game, this removes the kind of amped up possibilities that played out in Boston with Terry Rozier back in 2018. There’ll be no drafting in Drew Bledsoe to whip things into a frenzy in the Walt Disney World Resort bubble.

Put simply, the strange and unfamiliar playing conditions will allow players to focus purely on their games and doing what their teams need to do to win.

If ever there’s a postseason to allow Bledsoe to carry over his regular season play and truly make an impact, it may well be this one.