Milwaukee Bucks: Fast starts may not be easily replicated in restart

No team got off to better starts throughout the season than the Milwaukee Bucks, but will that translate over to Orlando for the season restart?

No matter which way you want to look at it, this Milwaukee Bucks season has clearly been a marathon, not a sprint, for a variety of reasons.

It’s a message that various Bucks players and coaches have given voice to as they continue to tune back up into game shape down in Orlando ahead of their campaign picking back up on July 31 against the Boston Celtics.

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While they continue to declare that message, the Bucks haven’t necessarily followed those words as they had routinely sprinted out of the gate over their opponents before their dream season was suspended more than four months ago.

Case in point, the Bucks have a +14.3 net rating in first quarters this season, the highest net rating for all NBA teams this year, per NBA.com/stats.

It’s quite a luxury for the league’s best team to enjoy such rollicking starts, all of which feeds into their reputation as the steamroller they were for the majority of the season. Of course, there’s a few reasons why that is, most notably with who head coach Mike Budenholzer picked to be the team’s starting lineup coming out of training camp last October.

Not only is the starting lineup of Eric Bledsoe, Wesley Matthews, Khris Middleton, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez one of the most-played five-man units across the league this season, it’s also the most productive too. The Bucks’ everyday starting lineup holds a +19.1 net rating, the highest such mark for lineups that have at least accumulated 250 minutes on the court together.

While injuries and absences have limited that lineup from seeing the floor together more at times throughout the season, the Bucks haven’t lost a step when inserting do-it-all sophomore Donte DiVincenzo into the starting unit.

When DiVincenzo fills the place of Middleton as he had to do when the All-Star was out earlier in the year, that five-man unit has a +15 net rating in 139 minutes, per NBA.com/stats. Replace Matthews with DiVincenzo and the Bucks have outscored their opponents by +22 points per 100 possessions over 40 minutes, which is assuredly a small sample size.

Clearly, the Bucks’ top line players, the ones that Budenholzer will have to rely on to fulfill their chase for a championship down at Walt Disney World, are as strong with any of the formidable lineups that another title contender can roll out on the court. But the depth the Bucks have amassed have equally helped to form the strong starts that have been associated with the Bucks over the last two years overall.

All of those factors will certainly come into play when the Bucks kick on with their season once again, especially as they will take a long view with their title hopes on the minds of all players and officials going into this restart.

But whether they can replicate their success in getting off to fast starts is one of many questions they’ll have to answer once the season picks back up again against the Celtics and beyond. The fact that the Bucks are currently down one significant piece in Bledsoe only clouds this issue and one that Bucks fans either didn’t know and/or took for granted.

That only speaks to the overwhelming success that the Bucks enjoyed all throughout the 2019-20 season and at this point, we can only speculate to whether they’ll look like the same steamroller after such an extended layoff. We’ll have our first look at that in less than two weeks.