The first five or so games of an NBA season can only give you so much quantitative data about how the next 77 or so will go—for example, the Warriors might not be this great without Steph Curry because they have mostly played bad or injured teams; the Nets are not going to remain this competent, as Dennis Schröder will at some point miss a shot—but they are useful as qualitative exercises. Shots will go in or not go in at aberrant rates in the short term, which doesn't tell you much, but the processes by which teams generate good shots and prevent their opponents from doing so tell you plenty. Some qualities, then, that the Milwaukee Bucks have shown through six games: unconnected, slow, stinky, creatively adrift, thin, and generally miserable.
The Bucks are 1-5, winners in Philadelphia on the second night of the season and then losers of five straight, with double-digit losses to the Bulls and Nets in there. They lost a heartbreaker to the Cavs on Saturday as Donovan Mitchell nailed a tough game-winner. The vibes are not great: Doc Rivers is all but openly wailing on the sidelines; Giannis Antetokounmpo is sitting through garbage time in a daze; Khris Middleton, who had surgery on both ankles this summer, has not played yet this season; Darvin Ham is on the bench; and the guy he brought with him from L.A., Taurean Prince, is giving quotes like, "I just feel like defensively, our IQ has to go up." They are currently the biggest disappointment in the NBA, under circumstances that are not altogether that surprising.
When Milwaukee fired Adrian Griffin last January in order to call up Doc Rivers from the ESPN NBA desk, the Bucks were 30-13, though they had not looked super convincing against a flimsy schedule. Griffin had quickly revealed himself to be out of his depth, and nobody in the locker room seemed to like him. The gambit was that Rivers could simply be an adult in the room, a guy who could clean up the small stuff like transition defense and get the team's two theoretically coherent pick-and-roll superstars to, you know, run a pick and then maybe roll. One could also make the case that the late-offseason pairing of Damian Lillard and Antetokounmpo kept them from ever syncing up, the sort of thing a full offseason could accomplish, a necessity for both the on-court success of the team and the general contentment of its franchise player. Rivers was a hiring with this here 2024-25 season in mind.
I am going to say some mean things about the Bucks shortly, so here is the coolest play of the Cavs loss:
Instead of that sort of thing happening all the time and the team kicking butt this season, the Bucks have gone 20-28 since Rivers came to town, a record that includes both the Bucks' semi-participatory, Giannis-less, six-game first-round loss to the Pacers in last season's playoffs as well as this season's regression. As was the case last year, both Antetokounmpo and Lillard are having fine individual offensive seasons that, taken together and considered alongside the team's Pistonian record, mount an interesting counterpoint against the theory that in the modern NBA scoring and superstars trump all.
The two primary problems facing the Bucks involve Lillard and Antetokounmpo, though neither is as simple as one of them being washed. The issues are quite simple: Milwaukee's defense is straight-up bad, which limits the Bucks' opportunities to run in transition; and they have zero functional depth. The path to the top of the East, or relevance for that matter, would be more straightforward if it were simply a matter of Lillard being creaky rather than deeper structural flaws in the team.
When the Bucks were kicking ass in the Mike Budenholzer era, they did it on defense, finishing first in defensive rating twice and only slipping out of the top 10 the season Brook Lopez sat out after back surgery. They were built around the unique two-way gifts of Antetokounmpo, and they played an extremely sensible, safe style of defense. Budenholzer had them unconcerned with forcing turnovers; they foreclosed the possibility of scoring at the rim, allowed tons of three-point attempts but from low-efficiency areas, forced teams into unappetizing shot diets, and dominated the defensive glass. As the meta shifted toward the hyperspaced game we see today, letting teams take that many threes became increasingly untenable, though with Jrue Holiday stymying the point of attack, the Bucks still finished with the fourth-best defense in the league two years ago.
It is somewhat shocking how much worse they are on defense now, with the starting backcourt of Lillard and Gary Trent Jr. Opposing ballhandlers can get their sets started way quicker, and easy advantages are there to be capitalized upon. If you are a lead guard, plan to put up a career high against the Bucks. Obviously the Bucks knew going in that swapping Holiday for Lillard would be a serious defensive downgrade, but the theory was that the general infrastructure could account for it, while the offense would take another leap, especially in the playoffs. But no, it turns out the Bucks' offense is super reliant on the defense getting stops.
Every team's offense is better after a stop, and every team's defense is better after a bucket; the Bucks' more serious problem is that their horrid depth exacerbates their flaws and shrinks their margin for error. Bobby Portis is the only playable bench guy they have right now, and he's been terrible this year. Pat Connaughton can't stay in front of anyone, Delon Wright looks old, and the collection of young guys rotating in the eighth-man slot all look unprepared for the responsibility. This is the backend team-building conundrum that almost all great teams face sooner or later: Once you get good enough to pick at the back of the first round, you have to hit one or two of those picks, or else you'll be left with a useless bench. Milwaukee has already declined the option on 2022 first-rounder MarJon Beauchamp. Andre Jackson Jr. does stuff like this:
The depth issues and the bad defense can be papered over if the team's three good players kick ass and everyone else plays hard. That happened against Cleveland, and while it wasn't enough, you could see the best-case scenario for Milwaukee. As Rivers said, Sam Merrill and Isaac Okoro hitting eight threes off the Cavaliers' bench killed the Bucks. That is super concerning, as it means the Bucks are capable of losing a game when their two superstars combine for 75 points.
When one of them is off, as Lillard was against Memphis, it's super ugly. Getting embarrassed by the shorthanded Grizzlies, the Bucks looked like a 25-win team. It's one thing to let Ja Morant slice-and-dice you. He'll do stuff like throw assists from his butt and explode to the rim at will, and you can't do a ton about that. But you can keep your opponent from getting simple fast break buckets after made baskets, which the Bucks let happen three times in their 23-point loss.
Probably this gets better, to some degree. Milwaukee will not finish behind the Pistons, though other than Middleton coming back, there is not a good deal about the Bucks that could be used to support an argument for this team winning a playoff series. They stink, and there are no easy paths out.
