Milwaukee Bucks: Caught in the middle of blending the old with the new

If you’re having trouble drawing any large sweeping conclusions 26 games into this Milwaukee Bucks season, you’re not alone.

Following their loss to the Utah Jazz Friday night, the Bucks stand at 16-10 on the season and have picked up two straight losses, all coming without their star acquisition from the offseason, Jrue Holiday. This stretch, by the way, comes after a five-game win streak for the Bucks in which they’ve played their best basketball to date this season against what was, admittedly, lower competition than what they’ve recently seen on their road trip.

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Even without Holiday, these peaks and valleys have been consistent with the Bucks’ run this season and couldn’t differ further from their 2019-20 season pre-shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Part of this is by design. This isn’t the same Bucks team in both personnel and the same operating structure that propelled them to the top of the league over the last two seasons under head coach Mike Budenholzer.

After all, the system that laid down the foundation to their regular season success, made Giannis Antetokounmpo a back-to-back Most Valuable Player and helped create career years for multiple players had failed in their last two playoff runs.

And as The Athletic’s Eric Nehm recently discussed on the ‘Weitzman Can’t Jump’ podcast with Yaron Weitzman, there was a push to make sure the Bucks, as we knew them previously under Budenholzer, wouldn’t succumb to the same pitfalls that doomed them come playoff time:

"“There was a lot of conversation when I talked with people around the (Bucks) that this can’t happen again. You can’t do the same things, you can’t lose the same way every single game. You have to be willing to do different things…I think a big part of that was making Bud realize that it can’t happen like this again. Not to say win or you’re out. That wasn’t the edict from ownership, but I think the edict from ownership was if you lose, you can’t do it like that.”"

The Milwaukee Bucks’ ongoing identity changes has brought its ups and downs.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention and it has sparked Budenholzer to adjust the Bucks’ offensive system and their spacing as well as experiment more with switches and veer away from their prized drop-back defensive scheme.

The change offensively has paid dividends as they have the highest offensive efficiency in NBA history. They’ve traded that off with quite the slide defensively as they ranked 11th in the NBA by allowing 110.4 points per 100 possessions this season, which is by far the worst mark the Bucks have set in the Budenholzer era.

It’s easy to look at the Bucks’ offseason additions as for why they’ve experienced such a slide and rightfully so.

Save for Torrey Craig, who’s been getting steady, if not many minutes in the Bucks’ rotation as of late, not one of D.J. Augustin, Bryn Forbes and Bobby Portis are net-neutral defenders, at minimum. But they’re also on equal footing with the Bucks’ cornerstones who have to adjust along with them in terms of learning and getting used to different principles and tactics than was the case when Budenholzer arrived.

That isn’t to insinuate that their have been chemistry issues as that clearly isn’t evident with their offensive output. It certainly means that the cohesion the Bucks have sought from their offseason has been more turbulent defensively where they’re more reliant on their individual players rather than a defined system that Budenholzer and his staff have meticulously built.

All of this is exactly what makes the Bucks a fascinating case study and how they’ve come around to handling the regular season. For better or for worse, Milwaukee is the go-to example of regular season overachievers who have failed to translate that into playoff success like the Toronto Raptors before them pre-Kawhi Leonard or even Budenholzer’s teams with the Atlanta Hawks.

Now with so much of what the Bucks are doing now this season being informed by their high-profile playoff flameouts, they’re embracing the triumphs and hurdles that come along with it. It certainly helps when you’re leading superstar buys in the way that Antetokounmpo has done so this season.

That, in turn, forces Bucks fans to realize what the team previously achieved and the ways that were key to their success is largely irrelevant to how this season unfolds moving forward. And the Bucks themselves are hoping that stay true of when their playoff run kicks off down the line.