After a disastrous start to their playoff run, the Milwaukee Bucks will need to come up with an emphatic response to get their season back on track.
For those who thought things had been rough since the resumption of the regular season, it turned out the start of the playoffs had a considerably ruder awakening in store for the Milwaukee Bucks.
Tuesday’s 122-110 defeat at the hands of the Orlando Magic was nothing short of a humiliation for a team that looked like a potential all-time great earlier in this same season.
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In terms of winning percentage, the Magic are right up there with some of the worst eighth seeds in playoff history. For a team that was so dominant that much of the season focused on their potential pursuit of 70 wins, dropping Game 1 was simply unforgivable for the Bucks.
The truth, though, is that in spite of how bad that opening loss was, and how poorly the Bucks have played since arriving at the bubble, nobody would be surprised if they were to roll off four consecutive wins and wrap the current series up in five games.
The bigger issue is that doing so would hardly even paper over the cracks at this point.
The air of invincibility that the Bucks once looked to have is well and truly gone. Any illusions of their defense leaving opponents bewildered has long since vanished.
What that means is that the onus on effective execution under the greatest of pressure has never been greater.
If the Bucks are to win a championship this season, they need to take control of games again. To do so, their fundamentals will have to return to what they once were.
For all of the discussion of opponents raining in triples, what Game 1 illustrated is that the Bucks cannot survive without protecting the rim. It’s been the central tenet of the team’s play under Mike Budenholzer, but the Bucks simply must make the paint their own again. That comes in first preventing barrages of scoring inside, but also from securing defensive rebounds at a high level.
If the Bucks can do that, the platform for transition scoring could well return. Getting out on the break eases the pressure that can otherwise fall on the Bucks’ half-court offense, and provides easy points for the likes of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Eric Bledsoe.
From there, just as was the case when the Bucks fell short last season, Milwaukee will still need their best shooters to knock down open shots. Whether that’s from a higher volume scorer such as Khris Middleton, reliable sharpshooters such as Kyle Korver, George Hill, and Wesley Matthews, or wildcards such as Donte DiVincenzo and Pat Connaughton; shots will simply need to fall.
If there was a lesson to be learned from Tuesday’s defeat, it should be that the Bucks won’t be able to have things all their own way against opponents that have gameplanned specifically to beat them. Just as important, though, is the fact that Milwaukee can’t run away from their own identity in search of solutions.
As an example, with the Bucks’ traditional dropping defense struggling in Game 1, Coach Budenholzer was quick to adjust and try switching. That offers up a positive and proactive approach in theory, but in going small and taking Brook Lopez out to go that route, the Bucks ended up giving up the interior and losing control of an element of the game that’s central to their overall style.
Mixing up the defense when things aren’t working is a good sign, but Coach Bud will need to trust in his players, and they will need to trust in themselves, to work their way through situations they may not have had to go through before.
Is Brook Lopez best utilized switched on to smaller guards? Absolutely not. But Lopez has improved significantly when it comes to staying in front of his man, and coming all the way out to the perimeter. With him out there, just like Antetokounmpo and Bledsoe, the Bucks would have their smartest and most imposing defense intact. They’d have their defensive leaders on the floor.
As much as anything else, this is a test of Milwaukee’s resilience, conviction, and leadership. If this season does still finish with a championship, the Bucks will need to overcome multiple difficult moments. They’ll need to find ways to continue playing their own game, but also learn how they can subtly tweak it and evolve their overall approach.
The expectation is that this series won’t be the Bucks’ last of this playoff run, but it will take significant action to ensure that’s the case.
There can be no coasting, no half-hearted efforts, and no treating the first round as a further warm-up for the real business to come.
If Milwaukee is serious about winning, that must start on Thursday evening. This can simply be a bump on the road, or it can be a colossal crater that can’t be very easily bypassed. The Bucks still control their own destiny, but now they need to start playing like it.