Milwaukee Bucks: Constructing an ideal playoff rotation

After the Milwaukee Bucks dropped Game 1 to the Orlando Magic, the rotation was one primary source of concern, but how can Coach Budenholzer maximize the effectiveness of his playoff rotation moving forward?

The Milwaukee Bucks received a wake-up call of sorts on Tuesday when they lost Game 1 of their first round series against the Orlando Magic.

The Magic entered the series as the eighth seed in the East with a 33-40 record, but had lost five of the last eight since entering the bubble. The team is also without some key players like Jonathan Isaac, who suffered a torn ACL in a game against the Sacramento Kings, and Mo Bamba, who will miss the remainder of the playoffs after leaving the bubble for post-coronavirus evaluation.

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All the same, the Magic took it to the Bucks on Tuesday in a game where Milwaukee showed some of the same flaws that earned themselves a 3-5 record in the seeding games. The series was supposed to serve the Bucks as a nice warm up for a team that has championship aspirations, but now the Bucks will have to focus a bit more after going down 0-1 in the series.

That being said, a key concern in the minds of Bucks fans is how Coach Bud will adjust his rotation moving forward after some questionable minutes distribution in Game 1.

Last year, the Bucks stuck to a nine to ten-man rotation for the majority of the playoffs featuring regular bench contributions from the likes of George Hill, Nikola Mirotic, Ersan Ilyasova, Pat Connaughton, and Sterling Brown.

This year, they have a greater wealth of options with George Hill, Donte DiVincenzo, Pat Connaughton, Kyle Korver, Marvin Williams, Ersan Ilyasova, and Robin Lopez, making it difficult to cut down the rotation to just nine or ten players.

It’s a good problem to have, as the Bucks will be far more equipped to make adjustments to certain schemes and coverages that may be thrown their way in the playoffs, a common criticism of last year’s Eastern Conference Finals series.

However, in a game where the Bucks trailed for the majority of the day, playing your superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo only 34 minutes is puzzling to say the least, especially with how other minutes were distributed. Here is a rough illustration of the rotation from Game 1 using a model based on the Rotations tool from Jeff Siegel’s EarlyBirdRights.com (minutes are rounded to the nearest half-minute):

As you can see, the Bucks’ key players did not see a lot of minutes for a game they were trailing most of the way.

In an attempt to solve this rotational quandary, I have created a mock-up of what I believe the Bucks’ ideal playoff rotation should be using the same rotation model. Using lineup data from NBA.com/stats, I began piecing together which lineup combinations could be most effective in the playoffs based on how well certain players play alongside one another.

So without further ado, I’ll get into some of my methodology for constructing an ideal playoff rotation for the Milwaukee Bucks moving forward.