Kyle Kuzma knocked down a three-pointer from the wing in the fourth quarter Sunday night, to pull the Milwaukee Bucks to within five points of the East-leading Cleveland Cavaliers. The score at that moment was 89-84. The Bucks had done this a few times already, scrambled and shoved and shoulder-charged their way to within a couple buckets of the visitors, who despite their all-timer of a win percentage are just a game up on the Oklahoma City Thunder for the NBA's top overall record. Kuzma's three, nailed with 8:55 left in regulation, seemed to keep momentum on Milwaukee's side, after they'd closed a 15-point first-half deficit to four points late in the third quarter.
The sequence to follow, ah, went poorly for the home side. A little over four minutes later, Darius Garland slipped a pass in traffic to a rolling Jarrett Allen, Allen thundered home a right-handed dunk over Brook Lopez, the crowd went absolutely silent, and the scoreboard showed the Bucks still standing flat-footed on 84 points but somehow now 18 points behind the visitors. Doc Rivers called a timeout. The game was over, but Rivers—always a few beats slower about this kind of thing—needed another 92 seconds to fully internalize it, whereupon he emptied his bench for the game's final three minutes.
I spent the remainder of this contest debating in my mind whether the brutal swing I had just witnessed was more like the Road Runner going "beep beep" and zooming off over the horizon, or was more like the man in black saying "I'm not left-handed, either" and then comprehensively outclassing his well-meaning opponent. I had a hard time with this! You see, as often as Wile E. Coyote is undone by an unimaginably cruel cosmos—times when his best-laid plans fail not because they are innately stupid but because a handheld spring-loaded contraption meant to propel a stick of dynamite forward into the path of the Road Runner instead propels the device's handler backward and somehow into and through a boulder—he is also slow and weak and hapless, and prone to blips of arrogance and catastrophic errors of judgment.
And, yes, the Bucks did bumble and blow it Sunday. The Cavaliers of this season are way, way better at basketball, but the Bucks had a chance. On the possession after Kuzma's three-pointer, the Cavs ran a not-very-tricky high-screen for Donovan Mitchell, using Evan Mobley as the screener. Mobley clipped Gary Trent Jr. and gave Mitchell a little bit of space angling toward the left wing, and then turned away from the play as if to fade toward the empty space to the right of the action. Mitchell's teammate, Sam Merrill, was set up near the left elbow, tangled with his own defender, AJ Green. Mobley's defender, Jericho Sims, got confused in traffic, failed to step up above the break to bother Mitchell, and then backpedaled into the paint as Mitchell rounded the screen. At the moment that Mitchell's feet squared up around the three-point arc, Trent was behind him and Sims was somehow getting smaller in his field of vision. Mitchell had missed all six of his three-point tries before this moment, but this is as good a look as a shooter of his caliber can ever expect in an NBA game, and he buried it. Milwaukee committed turnovers on four of their next five possessions and attempted—attempted—only one shot in the paint over the game's next five minutes of action.
Cleveland's depth and precision have a way of making even pretty good opponents look deeply unserious. The Cavs go at least 10 deep in perfectly competent ball-movers and floor-spacers and team-defenders. After the game, a very chill Donovan Mitchell talked to Scott Van Pelt about head coach Kenny Atkinson's emphasis on empowering his players, so that the team's role-players are confident in their duties, and everyone feels equal to the job in front of them. Their vibes are off the charts right now. De'Andre Hunter was a big-deal trade coup for the Cavaliers, but 12 games in he's coming off the bench behind Max Strus. There's no controversy, it's just the thing that works. All the little groupings are so smooth and effective that a couple minutes into a Cavs game you tend to forget who even is on the floor in front of you. It winds up being sort of appalling—like suddenly you find your mouth twisted in a grimace of genuine disgust—that a team like the Bucks could find themselves within a couple baskets of the Cavaliers in a fourth quarter and have no one better to throw at the opportunity than Kyle damn Kuzma and Jericho damn Sims. Are these guys even serious?
So the Bucks may have Coyote'd themselves. On the other hand, unlike the Coyote, the Bucks are generally pretty OK at what they do. They're just not so good at any part of the sport that the Cavaliers any longer have to take them very seriously. It really stood out in Sunday's contest, how the Cavaliers don't much need to raise their heart rate for this matchup. Giannis did some good bashing and dunking, and Milwaukee's defense made Cleveland's incredible offense look a little bit squeezed and gunked for portions of the game. But every time the Cavs felt a little bit threatened, they would suddenly rip off one of those sick screen-pass-pass-pass sequences, or a drive-kick-drive-kick, and suddenly Merrill or Dean Wade or Max Strus would be shooting wide open from the corner, and four different Bucks players would be guarding no one and looking utterly flummoxed. The Cavs had offered gentle stiff-arms a couple times already before Kuzma's fourth-quarter three-pointer, but this final, decisive run seemed like Cleveland just getting a little bit more serious just long enough to finally trigger garbage time. Yes, you're good at this, and yes, you have fought bravely and proudly, but I'm afraid now I must move on to more serious challenges.
The Bucks needed a win Sunday, not so much for seeding as for validation: They entered the game on the verge of being swept by their division rivals, and a troubling 0-for-8 against the three teams ahead of them in the East. Their effort was unmistakable, especially on a back-to-back. The Bucks are deadly serious about chasing a title: They added Damian Lillard last season and shed Khris Middleton in this one, and have the NBA's sixth most expensive active roster, and they've had five head coaches in three seasons. The Bucks won a title in 2021, in their fifth playoff appearance of the Giannis Antetokounmpo era; that same year, the Cavs won 22 games and finished tied for the NBA's fourth-worst record. The Bucks are supposed to be the older brother in this damn relationship!
But then there is the matter of Milwaukee hoping to fortify their championship credentials by hiring Doc Rivers and trading for Kyle Kuzma, each of whom would look extremely at home inside a box with "Acme Corporation" stamped on the side. The Cavs, meanwhile, appear to have made the perfect offseason coaching move, recently shipped off two valuable role-players in exchange for a sixth man without missing a beat, and are putting together their third 12-plus-game winning streak of the season. I think what we have here is a fourth-quarter-level "beep beep," a season-level left-handed-ing, and a big-picture, era-level Coyote-ing. I'm not explaining this any further. Good day, madam!
