Milwaukee Bucks: 3 things we learned during their opening week
Growing pains are here for the Milwaukee Bucks
If the Bucks’ 20-point defeat to the Knicks Sunday night served as a rude awakening for some Bucks fans, it shouldn’t have been in the first place.
The range of outcomes to start this Bucks season have been indicative of the enigma that this Bucks team is at this stage. A nailbiting one-point loss to the Boston Celtics, after originally been down by 17 going into the fourth quarter. A 39-point drubbing over the Golden State Warriors on Christmas looked to be business usual. That is until they went to Madison Square Garden last night.
As the Bucks look to bring their many pieces together and integrate them alongside their core headlined by Antetokounmpo, the question that all Bucks fans have been wondering is how they will impact their system on both ends of the floor.
That’s especially relevant to their elite defensive standing that is prioritized to take away the basket from the opposition. After allowing the fewest shot attempts on average at the rim and lowest field goal percentage on such shots in the last two seasons, the Bucks’ opponents have shot 61.3 percent on shots at the basket so far this year, ranking them 12th in the league, per Cleaning the Glass ($$).
With the backbone to the Bucks’ previous success nowhere to be found at this stage, it certainly leads to the jumbled and ineffective defensive performances we’ve seen thus far.
The same goes for trying to find the lineup configurations that can unlock their high-powered offense, which led to one of their best shooting performances of the Budenholzer era during that win over Golden State. The fact that they followed it up with one of the worst shooting outings of the Budenholzer era against the Knicks, where they went 18.4 percent from three, further points to the volatility we’ve seen from the Bucks on both ends of the floor.
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It’s three games into a long season, but it’s clear the pieces to the puzzle have not yet begun to fit or replicate the standard of success we’ve been used to seeing from Milwaukee. We’ll continue paying attention to how everything comes together for the Bucks by following similar trends at the start of every week over the 2020-21 season.