Milwaukee Bucks: Exploring why Brook Lopez shouldn’t play clutch time minutes

With 14 regular season games left, the 2020-21 season has been a rollercoaster for the Milwaukee Bucks.

Although they have shown signs of being a contender at times this season, the team continues to go through several uneven stretches of play, even as the start of the playoffs near. Thankfully, the Bucks were able to solve their latest bump in the road by beating the Philadelphia 76ers 124-117 at Fiserv Forum Thursday night.

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As the Bucks look to make one final push for the top seed in the East as they have held such an achievement in the past two seasons, their general embracing of adversity and crunch time situations has been a theme of this year.

While the Bucks have made considerable strides in their play during such situations, their recent loss to the Phoenix Suns earlier this week showcased the growth that is still needed in their execution and quest to find their ideal closing lineup. And ideally, it’s one that shouldn’t involved Bucks big man Brook Lopez.

Suns guard and future Hall of Famer Chris Paul, in particular, lit up the Bucks in pick-and-roll situations. Plays like the following opened up the door for the Suns to make their late push in the fourth quarter and eventually helped them take home what ended up being a controversial loss, due to the questionable call on Bucks forward P.J. Tucker in the final moments of overtime.

Of course, someone as masterful as Paul is when operating in pick-and-roll situations just knows how to pull the strings and thus see opposing defenses become undone time and again. But that play, along with the defensive miscommunication between Lopez and Holiday, showed the limitations of Lopez’s defensive role specifically.

The Milwaukee Bucks’ loss to the Suns showed Brook Lopez’s faults late in games

As the Bucks have veered away from exclusively utilizing their drop-back scheme this season and brought aboard Tucker in particular, Lopez’s role late in games hasn’t been a given as it has in years past. And this season has brought about the same kind of hardships the Bucks have felt defensively when faced against a team that can excel in the half court with pick-and-rolls.

To that point, Lopez has a -6.7 net rating in the 57 clutch time minutes he has played so far this season, per NBA.com/stats. Along with that, the Bucks are allowing 113.6 points per 100 possessions across the 321 fourth quarter minutes he has played this season. In the 375 minutes he’s on the bench for the final frame, the Bucks are allowing 107.2 points per 100 possessions.

All of this certainly hearkens back to how we’ve seen the Bucks’ playoff opponents such as the Toronto Raptors and Miami Heat exploit Lopez and the Bucks’ base defensive scheme.

The combination of multiple playmakers and shot creators as well as a spaced out floor, similar to how the Bucks had operated under head coach Mike Budenholzer before this season, stretched Lopez unbelievably thin while taking him away from the basket. Try as he might to stay up with quick and active ball handlers like Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet, Goran Dragic, Jimmy Butler and so on, Lopez and the Bucks simply couldn’t keep up to contain the teams they ultimately did them over the last two seasons.

These same defensive issues continue to be a liability for the Bucks this season whenever they’ve played against a team with multiple guards or forwards that can excel in these situations. This has even held true at times when Milwaukee has utilized Bobby Portis in such a role within this scheme and the Phoenix loss was just the latest reminder of this.

When Milwaukee has countered by going small, with Giannis Antetokounmpo playing at the five, they’ve been able to negate the effectiveness of this tactic. That’s because their smaller, more athletic lineups are able to switch everything rather than being forced to compensate for this mismatch. Although going small does have its drawbacks too, namely in the rebounding department, they’ve looked much more defensively solid when they’ve resorted to it.

We saw the Suns have to work a lot harder for their baskets in overtime because of this defensive change, but one can argue this switch and lineup change by bringing in Tucker in place of the injured Antetokounmpo came too late.

Lopez will certainly have his uses to the Bucks going into their playoff run, especially if they’re faced with a 76ers team led by Joel Embiid at any point. But unless there is a specific matchup that require the Bucks to need Lopez’s size and strength against elsewhere other than Embiid, the Bucks must evolve and look towards the alternatives they’ve taken to realize the contending aspirations they have this season.