The Milwaukee Bucks significantly overhauled their roster over the offseason and rekindling their chemistry may be one of the biggest challenges this 2020-21 season.
The challenges facing the Milwaukee Bucks going into the 2020-21 season stand unlike anything they will have faced before.
There are the obvious obstacles that stand in the way of making this Bucks season run as smooth as possible, especially with the looming threat of players contracting COVID-19 just as we had seen with the Bucks going into the bubble. But the Bucks won’t be alone in having to deal with that as we’re seeing with team training camps opening up around the league.
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What is more exclusive to the Bucks is how will their roster shakeup affect the standard of success they’ve established in each of the last two seasons under head coach Mike Budenholzer.
After all, the Bucks didn’t stand still this offseason following the swift exit in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
Their blockbuster swing for veteran Jrue Holiday is the headlining addition of the offseason, but they shored up their roster with plenty of depth moves that came together in short order following the start of free agency.
The Milwaukee Bucks have a new-look roster, but will have to conjure up chemistry before starting their regular season on December 23.
There’s no better indication of how much the Bucks’ roster turned over than looking at the continuity rankings recently assembled by NBA.com’s John Schuhmann. In it, Schuhmann shared that 50 percent of the minutes played by Bucks players on last year’s squad have returned to Milwaukee going into the 2020-21 campaign.
That is a far cry from the 77 percent mark they posted following their major moves made after their 60-win season and run to the Eastern Conference Finals for the 2018-19 season.
Of course, that is to be expected when the Bucks dealt away integral pieces such as Eric Bledsoe and George Hill in the four-team trade that netted them Holiday and lost their starting wing, Wesley Matthews, in free agency. That goes on top of moving on from Ersan Ilyasova, Marvin Williams retiring and Kyle Korver potentially following suit as he’s currently unsigned.
With all of that in mind and the context in which the Bucks are kicking off training camp, Bucks head coach Mike Budenholzer has been mindful of trying to get all of his players up to speed at a gradual pace as he told Jim Owczarski of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
"“What’s unique about this year is to not have the ramp-up and the time together in the gym in a normal offseason,” Budenholzer said. “This week is the beginning process of just getting kind of familiar with how we organize things, how we do things, the structure, the culture.“We always want to be great defensively. We want to start there. But to be great, you have to be great on both ends. I think we need to talk about offense. We need to be just as diligent and have just as much attention to detail there without overloading the guys, without doing too much too quick. They’ll pick it up.”"
With two-and-a-half weeks until the start of their season, we’re getting closer to all systems go. How the Bucks go about integrating everyone back into the fold, much less several of their additions, will certainly will inform their start to the season, as will the very real conditions we’re all dealing with everyday.