The Milwaukee Bucks have posted a 20–10 record since the first week of November, rising over that time from the bottom of the East up to fourth. Their rotten start certainly will continue to weigh on their playoff positioning—they can entirely forget about fighting for the East's top seed—but the Bucks are now clear of the play-in mess. An honest sizing-up of the field suggests things will probably stay this way: The couple of semi-credible teams behind them in the standings are either crabbed to hell (Orlando) or caught in states of dopey semi-seriousness (Indiana and Atlanta). Pending further notice, the Bucks are no longer Milwaukee Butt.
On Wednesday night, they beat the hell out of a Magic team stripped by injury of all but one of their handful of guys capable of making the basketball go into the basket. This was a laugher from very early on. Orlando led, 9–8, after a slow start, but from about the 7:30 mark of the first quarter the Bucks ripped off 19 straight points, and then went ahead by 26 points early in the second quarter. The game was never much of a contest again.
There was a satisfying seriousness to Milwaukee's offense: When the last Orlando defender was Wendell Carter Jr. or Jonathan Isaac, the Bucks tended to work patiently for open rhythm jumpers, but when those players were otherwise occupied, Milwaukee's ball-handlers were disciplined about exploiting Orlando's dearth of rim-protection. The Bucks under Mike Budenholzer had become an all-or-nothing, three-bombing operation, but last season their volume dipped, opposing the trend of the sport around them, and this season it has dipped again. Certainly no one will ever accuse Doc Rivers of being at or anywhere near the vanguard of innovation; I'm not here to celebrate or condemn Milwaukee's conservatism, but it was nice last night to watch Damian Lillard and Khris Middleton put their heads down and attack the paint, to say nothing of the team's various interchangeable role players. The Bucks shot 62.5 percent from the floor, against one of the league's top defensive squads. Who would like to guess how many three-pointers the Bucks attempted in the victory? You cannot! They attempted 12, making this just the third time since 2016 that a team has won a regular-season game while attempting so few.
The 122–93 victory wrapped up a tidy home back-to-back for Milwaukee, after a Tuesday night trouncing of the reanimated Sacramento Kings. Lest you worry that the Bucks are becoming too un-three-ish, they got up 45 of them against the Kings, and in the victory snapped a seven-game winning streak for the league's hottest also-ran. Feel free to read this game-to-game variance however you choose: as impressive versatility or a troubling lack of identity, as a fatal inability to imprint their style onto a contest or as liberation from the need to do so. Rivers apologists will say that he has always preferred to let his players play the game in front of them according to their own basketball instincts; Rivers antagonists will say, rather convincingly, that this is because he has absolutely zero fresh ideas for how to outfox the opposition.
Whatever the case, the Bucks have the dudes for piling up regular-season wins in lots of different ways, not all of them intentional. The sturdy performances in this back-to-back are encouraging, but the Bucks have a ways to go. They were absolutely flattened by the Knicks on Sunday in what was supposed to be a showcase at Madison Square Garden, in a game that offered approximately 14 minutes of honest competition. After it was over, Giannis Antetokounmpo warned that his Bucks must "get our stuff together" in order to compete with the conference's top teams. The Bucks are now 0–8 on the season against Cleveland, Boston, and New York. They haven't all been bad losses, but it's worth noting that even amid their stretch of encouraging form, the Bucks have lost their last three games against the class of the East by a combined 63 points. "Those are the top three teams, and we've played horribly against them," said Antetokounmpo, per ESPN. "At the end of the day, when we're playing the better teams, we've got to do a better job."
The Bucks are still jiggering with the formula. The always-hurt Middleton is presently coming off the bench, which he explained is a temporary move designed to get him into all of Milwaukee's closing configurations while saddled with a minutes restriction. Middleton's ankles are pretty much never free of pain or discomfort; he sat out a recent road win over the Toronto Raptors due to inflammation, with Rivers lamenting that his star forward is "just not moving every night the way you'd like him to." Middleton's spot in the starting lineup is being filled by serviceable veteran Taurean Prince; the fifth spot in Milwaukee's starting crew is going to second-year man Andre Jackson Jr., whose play has improved over the course of the season but who at his best is precisely no one's idea of a starter on a contender, no matter the pedigree of the team's core. There are still roster questions to be answered, and depth is an ongoing issue. Relatedly, the NBA's trade deadline falls on Feb. 6.
The season will be even more fun than it already is if the Bucks can stick among the East's contenders. Right now they're doing enough to hang onto the back of the serious teams—and recent Thibs-ian minutes distribution suggests the Knicks might not have the legs to persist among that group for very long—but far from enough to suggest that they could throw a scare into any one of them across a series. Eventually, it will behoove the Bucks to iron out some kind of identity. In the meantime, it's a luxury for them to have it established that they can beat the hell out of solid and even surging teams while making it up as they go.
