Milwaukee Bucks’ head coach Mike Budenholzer has hopefully coached his last game with the team. After Wednesday night’s embarrassing meltdown and epic collapse in the first round loss to the Miami Heat, he does not deserve to see the light of day again from a coaching perspective.
Mike Budenholzer has absolutely humiliated the Milwaukee Bucks organization on so many levels. To say the fan base has had enough of him and is beyond apoplectic would be a massive understatement.
A new voice is very much needed to lead the Milwaukee Bucks
Let’s make no mistake about it. The Milwaukee Bucks organization should not have given head coach Mike Budenholzer a contract extension in 2021 after winning their first championship in 50 years. There is unequivocally no doubt that the Milwaukee Bucks won a title in spite of Budenholzer, and not because of him. Fans can defend him and argue this until they are blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that in no way did he win them a championship that season.
The truth of the matter is that fan favorite, superstar, and the world’s best player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, carried the team on his back after being injured. Budenholzer deserves as little credit as possible for winning a title.
Throughout the 2021 playoffs, the Bucks put up some stinker games and were inches away from being eliminated, had it not been for Kevin Durant’s toe. Had the Bucks lost that series in Game 7, Budenholzer would have been out of a job, and deservedly so.
Fast forward two years, and very little has changed with Budenholzer if anything at all. He has always been a floor-raiser and a system builder who is absolutely atrocious at making decisions on the fly throughout the course of a game.
His in-game management and adjustment skills are for the most part horrific. He possesses absolutely zero situational awareness and does not have any ability whatsoever to think on his feet.
He continues to call timeouts when he shouldn’t call them and doesn’t call timeouts at the most crucial times. Specifically, the Miami Heat went on two long scoring runs, which completely changed the momentum throughout Games 4 and 5 of this playoff series.
Any fan sitting at home and watching on television knows that you call a timeout to stop the bleeding and kill the momentum when the opposing team goes on a 13-0 run, but not Budenholzer. Instead, he calls timeouts three to four minutes too late when the situation on the court has gone off the rails and sideways.
The Milwaukee Bucks have been such a poorly coached team on both ends of the floor in the playoffs under Budenholzer. He is absolutely incapable of running any kind of coherent offensive scheme in the playoffs.
Hence the reason why the Bucks have had offensive scoring droughts under him in the playoffs for the past five years. He is incapable of drawing up offensive plays, the offense becomes stagnant, and guys stand around looking clueless and scared.
Clearly, this is all a reflection of their head coach. It’s maddening how he had two timeouts remaining still when they were eliminated in Game 5. For some inexplicable reason, he did not use on at the end of regulation, which would have advanced the ball to half-court with 0.5 seconds remaining.
The second timeout should have been called on the final possession in overtime when the Bucks couldn’t even get a shot off as time expired. That was a fitting end to an absolute epic failure of a season in every way, which all falls on him.
Budenholzer has never been and will never be a playoff coach…bottom line. His leadership is questionable at best, and his voice has become overly stale.
He clearly lacks the necessary communication skills to be a leader in many ways, as evidenced by his team seemingly tuning him out at various points throughout his five-year tenure with the Bucks, especially come playoff time.
Regardless of his status of having an NBA title to his name, Milwaukee Bucks fans have developed quite a hatred for this man, and rightfully so. He continues to coach with the deer-in-the-headlights look (pardon the pun) and is oblivious to simple things that everyday fans with no basketball coaching experience can see from their couch while watching on tv.
It will be cause for celebration WHEN Budenholzer is out of a job, a decision that the organization is seemingly pondering, and the fans no longer have to be subjected to him. This will help ease the pain of the embarrassing 2023 playoff debacle, which was no doubt for the most part a reflection of him.
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