Milwaukee Bucks: Pat Connaughton on team’s growth as champions

Something that a lot of teams who win their first championship will tell you is that there’s a huge weight lifted off your shoulders once you finally win. It can lead to less pressure on yourself knowing that you finally won and have the confidence in yourself that you can do it. This appears to be no different for the Milwaukee Bucks according to Pat Connaughton.

In his recent appearance on The Long Shot Podcast with Duncan Robinson, Connaughton dives into several topics including his approach defensively, his time as a two-sport athlete, and the Bucks mentality coming into this season.

Connaughton isn’t typically someone who will give long, detailed answers during press conferences but he was comfortable during this interview. He dropped a lot of good nuggets, especially about his experience playing two sports in college and his decision to forgo signing with an MLB team.

However, what would interest Bucks fans most are his thoughts about how the team grew over the last few seasons, how they used the adversity of their previous playoff failures to help them in their championship run, and what their mentality is as they come in as NBA champions.

Pat Connaughton on how the Milwaukee Bucks are facing the 2021-22 season

Although there are a lot of expectations on the Bucks to repeat as champions, they’ve taken the approach of not being complacent and continuing to get better. Their whole motto last season was to keep getting better each day and that’s something that was echoed again at media day but also by Connaughton on the podcast.

"“I think what we’ve done a good job of to date and our coaches really hammered home on us — and Giannis, even, and Khris and Jrue — is that there is a lot of room for improvement. We didn’t have a smooth sailing playoff run. We got down in a lot of the series and we had times where we did not look like a championship team. So how do we learn from those mistakes and how do we make sure that we’re coming out better and we don’t have a lackluster sense of urgency around us just because we were fortunate to win the championship.”"

One thing that stuck out to me was Connaughton mentioning the Bucks’ Big 3 specifically and that they’re leading the charge in trying to make sure the team isn’t complacent. It’s not a surprise that those three are stepping up and leading, but it’s good to see. Too often a team can see its stars become more lackadaisical and that can trickle down to the role players. That doesn’t seem to be the case for the Bucks with their best players reinforcing that they can still get better despite winning the championship.

There was, of course, a sense of relief upon winning that championship. The Bucks have been seen as championship favorites (at some point in the year) in every season since head coach Mike Budenholzer took over but had fallen short in the first two playoff runs. As Connaughton notes, it wasn’t necessarily about winning that first championship, however.

"“I would say it was almost more about being able to overcome adversity … We go down to the bubble and we get our butts kicked by you guys [Miami Heat] and when we come back, suddenly everyone is on edge. I made the comment to a few people around the team like ‘hey, this has only been a two year build, like it doesn’t happen overnight’ … But to get over the hump having gone through the adversity of outside expectations after the first two years, I think gave a breath of fresh air to a lot of the guys; management, coaches, Giannis, Khris, guys that knew we were good enough to do it but it’s different to actually do it. Within the locker room we had the confidence, but you know the NBA, you have outside opinions and critics, that plays a role in our game and so to silence them for a year, to have done it going into this year was really important.”"

This was a great answer from Connaughton, detailing how the team did feel like they had to prove their doubters wrong coming into last season after flaming out in the bubble the previous season. It’s interesting to hear that the organization was on edge, but that Connaughton held the opinion that they were still early on in their championship status.

That was something I had believed as well, that it was hard to completely call them failures for not winning after really only being a championship-caliber team for two seasons, and in the first one, no one expected them to be. But many believed that the Bucks couldn’t win a championship as they were constructed, but they used their previous adversity as fuel for their championship run.

"“The funny thing about it is, in answering questions this year during the championship run, there were the same reporters who asked me questions in the first year and my answer was you don’t need experience because we didn’t have experience and at the end of the day, you need experience and experience is going through adversity and experience is learning from your mistakes, learning from the things that went wrong … We didn’t make it easy on ourselves, but overcoming that adversity made it that much sweeter because of the adversity we faced my first two years here.”"

I’m sure there are many similar stories from past champions, but the Bucks seemed to grind through their championship run. It didn’t come easy, except for maybe the series against the Heat but even then, it was going up against a team that had beaten them the year before and gave them some of that doubt.

There’s a sense that the Bucks will be playing with clearer heads this season now that they’ve overcome the obstacles of winning in the playoffs and doing so when faced with as much adversity as they did through the championship. Connaughton gave a little peek into what the Bucks mentality will be going into this season and how much of a weight was lifted off their key player’s shoulders in winning a championship.

The Bucks will officially begin their championship defense against the Brooklyn Nets on October 19th and it will be fun to see how they match up against the other presumptive favorite having now won a title.