The Milwaukee Bucks got smoked by the Indiana Pacers in Game 4 on their home court, in a loss that felt less like ending a chapter and more like slamming a book shut, incinerating it, and purging the memory of ever having read it. They are now down 3–1 to a team that has proved matchup poison for them even in the best of times; Giannis Antetokounmpo's game is stretched as thin as his patience; they have swiftly degraded from a team with a strong identity to a team about nothing, playing yesterday's game with yesterday's players. Their only other good player just wrecked his leg, they handed their archrival a title in pursuing said good player, and because of that, they have no future. Four years after the Bucks won a championship, things are looking unimaginably bleak in Milwaukee.
Halfway through the first quarter of Sunday's Game 4, Damian Lillard burst forward to tap an offensive rebound to the corner, then crumpled and instantly grabbed at the back of his left leg. As of this writing he has not received an official diagnosis, but everyone in the know is reporting that he probably did in his Achilles. With Lillard in the lineup, the Bucks had an essentially even point differential, with his 24.9 points per game being largely canceled out by his inability to even contain anyone with a live dribble. Still, they needed his offensive dynamism in the playoffs, because without him, the offense funnels to Bobby Portis and Kevin Porter Jr., and that's if the Bucks are lucky enough not to be dragged into a Kyle Kuzma game. Antetokounmpo is still the best player in this series, but everything he gets is very tough, and Indiana's extremely connected defense is never really stressed out by anything he does—again, because his team is butt.
That Lillard was even in a position to play in his team's soon-to-be over first-round series against the Pacers was itself a minor hematological miracle. Lillard's final action of the regular season came on March 18 against the Golden State Warriors, after which he was diagnosed with a deep vein thrombosis in his right calf. DVT can be a career-ending condition, and even if Lillard had cleared the clot, the blood-thinning medication he'd need to take to do so would force him to chill for a while anyway. Recovery from DVT is impossible to predict with any degree of certainty; a doctor who spoke to the Athletic put the timeline "anywhere from three months to a year," but Lillard was able to get back on the court after a little more than a month.
Per ESPN, "Doctors have told Bucks officials that the speed of Lillard's recovery has never been seen before, but it occurred because of early treatment, detection, and specialists working on him before a formal diagnosis, according to sources." Despite being unable to exercise for a month, Lillard gave it a heroic go—and all he'll have to show for it is 6-for-27 shooting from the field in the series, and now perhaps an even more career-threatening injury.
It's a profound bummer. The way Lillard attempted to strongarm his way from the Trail Blazers to Miami in the summer of 2023 was somewhat annoying, and while it burnt up a lot of the goodwill he'd banked by being Mr. Portland forever, I still found him someone worth rooting for. The Bucks fit made total sense on paper: Here, in Antetokounmpo, was a natural screen-setter and roller, theoretically responsible for springing the second-best tiny shooting genius the Pacific Division had ever seen.
None of it worked in practice. Antetokounmpo and Lillard never got on the same page, Milwaukee fired coach Adrian Griffin halfway through his first season in charge, and after precisely one good 2024 playoff game, the Bucks were summarily executed by the same Pacers team that had punked them in Las Vegas months before. Khris Middleton's ankles turned to fine powder, and Brook Lopez lost even more mobility. Suddenly, a team that had won the 2021 title with a very coherent, sensible identity—a squad of big nasty mashers that would destroy you at both rims—became adrift, both stylistically and personnel-wise. Their obsolescence was hastened by the twinned presence of Doc Rivers and Darvin Ham.
It gets worse. The Bucks won't control their own first-round draft selection until 2031, having sent their picks to Portland or New Orleans in the intervening odd-number years with swaps in the even-number years. They just re-signed GM Jon Horst, which is curious given that he helped put them in this mess. Teams only torch their future for the sake of contending in the present, not to bleed out in the first round in Indianapolis for the second straight year. Now all signs point to Antetokounmpo getting the hell out of town.
Why wouldn't he? The Bucks have zero path to contention with their current decaying roster and zero assets they can further torch. Lillard has two more years for $112 million on his deal. The ride is in all likelihood over. I just hope Lillard can play at something like a high level again at some point in what's left of his career, which, while faintly tinged with tragedy, has been incredibly fun to watch.
