Milwaukee Bucks: Growing lapses down the stretch a cause for concern?

Despite the NBA Playoffs being just around the corner, the Milwaukee Bucks are continuing to show signs that they’re not playing at the level required to be a true title contender.

As we have written quite a few times at different points throughout this NBA season, it’s been quite a roller coaster of performances that we’ve seen from the Bucks. Every time it appears that the team may be heading the right direction and building momentum, they have awful losses like the one they just had against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night.

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Milwaukee went into that game with control over their own seeding in the Eastern Conference standings. If they at least matched the Brooklyn Nets record over their final five games, they’d end up as the second seed in the East.

It may not have been the ideal seed that they needed to give themselves the best shot at winning the Conference, but it would have put them in a more favorable position in both the opening round and the Eastern Conference Semfinals than if they finished in the third spot.

Now, the Bucks are left holding out hope that Brooklyn will drop at least one more game than them before the season wraps up. Instead of facing the winner of the seven-eight matchup in the play-in tournament, both of who would be favorable matchups for them, Milwaukee could now face any one of the Atlanta Hawks, Miami Heat and the currently sixth-seeded New York Knicks as all three teams are in a three-way tie, as of this writing.

The Milwaukee Bucks have shown worrying signs down the final stretch of the season

Some may question why losses like this matter. Are we overrating the importance of having an easier opening round matchup? It wasn’t like having easy first round matchups the past two seasons necessarily prepared them for tougher opponents in the second round. Shouldn’t we be looking at some of their good wins against the Brooklyn Nets and the Philadelphia 76ers and the fact that they’re healthy as being favorable signs for the team above everything else?

The truth is that these losses do matter. The recipe for defeating this team, despite all of the experimentation from head coach Mike Budenholzer this season, remains the same: Blitz the Bucks from behind the three point line and in pick-and-rolls, then let their uneven half-court offensive play unravel them. Whether it’s been in close games against quality opponents or in blow outs at the hands of teams below them in the standings, the team has seen the same issues unravel them over-and-over again, especially on the defensive end.

Monday night wasn’t the first time that they lost a game like this recently. They put in similarly atrocious performances against the Atlanta Hawks and team with the worst record in the league in the Houston Rockets just a few weeks ago. Both of those games came just after the team had won back-to-back against the 76ers to pull themselves back into contention for the Conference’s top seed.

This is the time of the season that you should be playing your best basketball. Instead, Milwaukee continues to put in performances that look like a team just getting out of the gates for the season.

Even though they won two of three of these games, Monday night was the third consecutive game that they conceded 130 or more points. All three of those games saw them playing against opposition with a losing record on the season. The fact that these performances followed back-to-back, hard fought wins against the Nets and came in games where they still had something meaningful to play for is suggestive of a team that thinks they can pick and choose when to give it their all. Not one that’s prepared for the rigors of a tough playoff run.

Even if the regular season’s importance has been waning, these losses still have a substantive impact on the team’s ability to contend for a title. Rather than building momentum for themselves going into the playoffs, the Bucks have shown time and time again that they’re simply incapable of stringing together high level play on both ends of the floor for a sustained period of time. The closest this team came to doing this was just after the all-star break, but that run appears to have been a blip rather than a sign of a team taking the next step.

These losses have taken the Bucks from having a real shot to earn the conference’s top seed to seeing them sit below Brooklyn and Philly. The odds of them beating both of those teams, if they even make it that far in the playoffs, have gone down substantially given the potential path that now lays before them.

Not all of the blame for this uneven play should necessarily be hoisted on the shoulders of Coach Budenholzer either. Every player on the team, from Giannis Antetokounmpo to Khris Middleton on down has had their fair share of ups and downs as well as disappointing performances. Everyone bears some responsibility for these performances, even over a highly condensed schedule such as this one.

Perhaps this team has another gear that they’ll be able to find when they get to the postseason, making all of these concerns moot. However, given how their past two playoff runs ended, there’s real reason to question whether this team will be able to do that. This isn’t the 2017-18 Golden State Warriors and given the the two playoff runs that precede this year’s run, this team has yet to prove that they have what it takes to truly win when it matters most.

We’ll see what the coming weeks will bring. However, there’s real reason to worry that this Milwaukee Bucks team does not have what it takes to truly compete for a title this season.