We’re only a couple of days away from the Milwaukee Bucks tipping off their first-round matchup in the NBA playoffs on Sunday.
After a roller-coaster regular season, the defending champs finished strong down the stretch to finish as the third seed in the Eastern Conference to set up a favorable matchup against their division rival Chicago Bulls.
Milwaukee won all four games over Chicago by a combined 59 points and the Bulls went 3-20 against playoff teams from either conference, thus leading to the Bucks being heavily favored in this series.
Still, these two teams have a lot of history against each other (both long-term and recent) and there’s a lot of big-name talent so there will be many eyeballs on this series. Time to get all caught up with where this series is at as we’re just over 24 hours away from tip-off of Game 1.
What analysts are saying about the Milwaukee Bucks versus the Chicago Bulls
As I mentioned, this series isn’t expected to be close given the four regular-season meetings between these teams and the Bulls’ dreadful record against good teams this season.
That is reflected by the national media, too. It’s not just me being biased and assuming the Bucks will dominate. All 20 ESPN experts that gave their predictions have the Bucks winning this series in six games at the most.
Of those 20, seven of them predicted the Bucks to sweep and another nine said it would go five games.
One of those 20 ESPN personalities was Tim Legler, who had the Bucks winning in five games, he broke down the series like this with Mike Greenberg on Greeny.
"“Typically when I start looking at first round series, I usually want to go ‘you know, six games’ because it covers you that way. If it is a longer series, you sounded like you knew that it was going to be, right? You don’t want to go ‘oh, four or five games.’ That’s the one series that I’m looking at and saying five, that’s a five game series.” “Milwaukee right now, like, they got everything in order at the right time. Getting Brook Lopez back when they did, such an important player for them with his shooting and his rim protection. Connaughton came back in enough time, he’s playing very well and then the three stars are healthy. This is a team that now knows they can get it across the finish line.”"
The health of the Bucks has been a major storyline all season, with impact players going in and out of the lineup, including Lopez missing the majority of the year after having back surgery. However, as Legler points out, they’re healthy at the right time and Lopez has looked fantastic since returning as has Connaughton. Now that the Bucks are whole, expect them to be ready for the playoffs from the jump.