Are The Freakish Milwaukee Bucks Heading Towards Another Collapse?

This image is a derivative of Milwaukee Bucks by Michael Tipton (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Milwaukee Bucks have a habit of making basketball look very skilled and delicate and then all of a sudden wonderfully savage.

Most of the time they play "Morey Ball" on offence, pushing the pace (first in the league) and jacking threes (4th in threes attempted). The normality in 2020 of seeing teams casually take semi-contested threes is still kind of jarring. 

What was once criticised as 'settling' is now just math.

There’s no denying it works, and basketball looks a lot better for it.

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Yet, there's something a little bland about the Bucks' brand of bombing. This isn't peak Golden State Warriors - where modern ideas were perfected by generational talent. 

The Bucks rank 18th in the league in three-point percentage and of their seven players who take at least three triples per game, only Khris Middleton and Kyle Korver are meaningfully above league average accuracy.

As a result, Milwaukee spends a lot of time running around screens for average shooters to launch from deep. It's not all that inspiring.

The inspiration comes, though, when Giannis Antetokounmpo suddenly says good night to all the careful logic and starts doing things that are brutal and not possible.

It can happen on any possession - the Bucks are running their screens, setting their picks, and everything looks kind of normal, and then Giannis is all of a sudden charging down the lane like Young Shaq As Point Guard.

When players leave their feet in the lane, there's generally just the one ascension. Sometimes there are marvels like Michael Jordan or peak Derrick Rose, where there seems somehow to be a secondary upward burst once already airborne. Then there is Giannis, who is in a historical category all on his own, where the extent of his limbs gives him a second ascent.

The Greek Freak has balled out in his first two games 😤

Catch Giannis and the @Bucks at 1:30pm ET on NBA TV! pic.twitter.com/h8poWAWVtK

— NBA TV (@NBATV) August 4, 2020

He dunks from angles that no one else can. He looks to be trapped off-balance with nowhere to go, a turnover imminent, and then suddenly he is dunking. His darting steps in the paint followed by a leap and then the extension of those arms remains the most surreal, improbable sight in basketball.

His presence on defence is perhaps even more impactful. Milwaukee's length and discipline makes them the league's best defence, with the paint completely impenetrable (the Bucks concede the fewest shot attempts around the basket and give up by far the lowest FG% there too). There's just nowhere to go and nothing to do - teams are forced to heave threes (the Bucks concede the most three-point attempts in the leagues), largely because the shots have to come from somewhere. 

They close out possessions too, as the best defensive rebounding team in the league by far. Giannis reminded everyone of this, brilliantly, in the close loss to Houston, at one point casually holding off a desperate James Harden with one arm while nonchalantly grabbing a defensive board with the other, like a 13-year-old keeping a 4-year old at bay.

The defence has made Milwaukee, by the numbers, the best team in the league by a significant margin. The gap between their top spot in net rating and the Lakers in second, is the same as the gap between the Lakers and the Rockets in seventh.

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By these numbers, the Bucks should be overwhelming title favourites. That they are not (the Lakers are favourites) speaks to the sneaking doubts about this team.

How different would this all be had the Bucks made one more shot in overtime to beat the Raptors last year in Game 3 to take a 3-0 lead? The way they blew that series has shaped the perception of them. They managed to lose four playoff games in a row to end their season and Giannis did not top 25 points in any of them.

Much of this is unfair - Milwaukee just stopped making threes over those last four games (32.6%) while Fred VanVleet and Toronto (39%) couldn't miss. But there are concerning things that do hold true - mainly that Milwaukee just couldn't score against a great Toronto defence, with a league-worst-type 102.3 offensive rating over those final four games.

If Giannis can't rampage to the rim, then the Bucks can't really rampage anywhere. 

Their support players are exceedingly functional, but not particularly dynamic offensively. They have the leaner Paul Pierce game of Khris Middleton and the untrustworthy chaos of Eric Bledsoe, both of whom are fine, but not elite creators for others.

The final minutes of the Bucks' loss to Houston on Sunday night told a story - most of Milwaukee's offence was Brook Lopez post-ups, Middleton pull-ups and wild passes into crowded lanes. At the other end, Houston had two reliable, elite shot creators to go to every possession.

Harden shows up with some great late-game defense. 🔒 #NBA #Rockets #Bucks pic.twitter.com/IWgMuyL7s8

— Clutch Report Media (@clutchrptmedia) August 3, 2020

Milwaukee's defensive strategy was bizarre, appearing intent to just give up wide open corner threes. James Harden and Russell Westbrookgot their heads around this quickly and realised that if they drove into the middle of the lane, a kick-out pass to the man in the corner would be there every single time - so they just did it, almost every single possession for stretches, and Milwaukee never adjusted.

There’s not much point reading too much into what Milwaukee does in these regular season games. These games – and the entire regular season, really – have been a warm-up, with the real games starting for the Bucks in the second round of the playoffs.

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Unlike the LA teams, the Bucks are not marching towards an inevitable, storied showdown with another great team in their conference.

There are only honourable, extremely respectable teams in the East – no terrors. This is perhaps doing the Raptors a disservice, but it’s hard to see how Toronto scores on Milwaukee, particularly given their dependence on transition (with the highest transition frequency in the league and third highest efficiency). The Celtics would have to hit a probably untenable amount of pull-up jump-shots to beat Milwaukee, and the Sixers would have to suddenly, magically emerge as the team they were always supposed to be.

In the end, despite Milwaukee’s shortcomings, the defence is likely too strong for anyone in the East to move past them. In the Finals, though, should they get there, the offence will need to find another gear – the one it never found last year.

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