'You can never be the team to fold': The Bucks navigate a historically slow start

THE CROWD AT Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee was still standing on its feet, waiting for the outcome of one final possession to determine if the Bucks could stop their losing skid. Moments earlier, Damian Lillard made a go-ahead jumper to give the Bucks a one-point lead, leaving 9.8 seconds on the game clock, allowing the building a brief moment to celebrate. Now they just wanted one more defensive stop.

Cavs forward Evan Mobley lofted a high inbounds pass to Donovan Mitchell, who tipped the ball to himself near the half-court line. As Mitchell broke for the basket, he was met on the drive by Gary Trent Jr., who knocked the ball away from Mitchell, forcing the five-time All-Star to recollect himself.

With Trent and Giannis Antetokounmpo providing help defense to clog the space toward the sidelines, Mitchell dribbled back to the middle of the floor. He rose up a few steps from the free throw line and knocked down a game-winning jumper.

The 114-113 loss was another letdown during a nightmare opening stretch for Milwaukee. After a victory against the short-handed Philadelphia 76ers on opening night, the Bucks dropped six straight games, before finally snapping their losing streak with a 123-100 win on Thursday against the rebuilding Utah Jazz. Still, the Bucks are off to their worst start since 2013-14, Antetokounmpo’s rookie season.

Winning only one of their first seven games put the Bucks in a hole only a few teams have ever successfully climbed out of. Over the past 25 seasons, only three teams have started 1-6 or worse and made the playoffs: the 2021-22 New Orleans Pelicans, the 2004-05 Chicago Bulls and the 2003-04 Miami Heat, according to ESPN Research.

“We will make the playoffs,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said after Monday’s loss in Cleveland. “I’m not worried about that.”

Simply making the playoffs is not the goal for a Bucks team that is four seasons removed from winning a championship. But they’ve won only a single playoff series since, despite having Antetokounmpo — one of the most dominant forces in the NBA — in his prime. The 29-year-old forward is averaging 31 points, 12 rebounds and six assists on 63% shooting, even better numbers than those from when he won his two MVP awards.

Antetokounmpo’s presence led the Bucks to push in all of their remaining assets to trade for Lillard last September, after they’d fired their championship coach, Mike Budenholzer, despite a season in which he had the best record in the NBA. They then fired Budenholzer’s replacement, Adrian Griffin, despite him leading Milwaukee to a 30-13 start last season, because they believed another coach was better suited to help them reach their championship ceiling.

Instead, the Bucks have dropped to 18-25 since Rivers took over at the end of January. They are currently ranked in the bottom half of the league in both offensive efficiency (18th) and defensive efficiency (19th), per NBA.com.

“Right now, we don’t have an identity,” Antetokounmpo said following a loss to the Brooklyn Nets late last month. “Like, how are we going to win the game? Are we going to defend for 48 minutes? Are we going to move the ball for 48 minutes? Are we going to attack and play fast for 48 minutes — or 36 minutes and slow down in the last 12? We got to find an identity. We don’t have that right now.”

Milwaukee’s slow start does not damn their season and internally the Bucks say they are making steps toward a turnaround. After blowout losses to the Brooklyn Nets and Memphis Grizzlies, the Bucks played two tight games against the 9-0 first-place Cleveland Cavaliers, even with Antetokounmpo sidelined Monday. Three-time All-Star Khris Middleton has not played in a game this season and the Bucks are optimistic his presence will help cure some of the team’s ills.

“As a leader of this team, I think we are headed toward the right direction,” Antetokounmpo said last week. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to go on a five-game winning streak, but I know we are playing better and trusting one another. The ball is moving. There’s a lot of good things we’re doing.”

The Bucks have few options other than trusting things will get better. They’ve already changed coaches twice in the past 18 months. The win-now trades they’ve made this decade have left them without tradable assets and their payroll leaves them without flexibility. Their slow start has left executives around the NBA wondering, how much longer can the Bucks hold on?

“The worry is outside the building,” Rivers told reporters after practice this week. “I guarantee you that. There is none inside the building.”

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AT MEDIA DAY on Sept. 30, Antetokounmpo sat on a high-top chair and fielded questions for about 20 minutes on a range of topics: from being a flag bearer at the 2024 Paris Olympics for Greece and getting married to his long-time girlfriend, Mariah, in September. Those events, and some time rehabbing an injury from the Olympics, prevented him from working out with Lillard over the summer, but he said he was still optimistic about their partnership in Year 2.

When a question was posed about the team’s new role players — veterans such as Taurean Prince, Gary Trent Jr. and Delon Wright — and how their skills could help the team get back to the Conference Finals or Finals, Antetokounmpo first responded with a pause.

“First of all — conference finals or finals — we got to out of the first round,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

That’s been a challenge for Milwaukee since winning the title in 2021, when Antetokounmpo spoke about how winning that title made him hungry to win more. The following season, Milwaukee lost a hard-fought seven-game series to the Boston Celtics in the second round. In each of the past two seasons, the Bucks have been upset as a higher seed in the first round, losing to the eighth-seeded Miami Heat in five games in 2023 and the sixth-seeded Indiana Pacers in six games this past April.

The loss to the Heat set Milwaukee on a dramatic course to reshape its team and maximize Antetokounmpo’s prime, trading for Lillard to serve as his co-star and bringing in Rivers, a championship coach with experience handling star talents.

However, the returns haven’t been there. Individually, both Antetokounmpo and Lillard have started the year strong, ranking second (31.0) and seventh (28.4), respectively, in the NBA in scoring. But Milwaukee is outscoring teams by a modest 1.6 points per 100 possessions when the two share the court, and questions remain about their chemistry on offense.

“I feel like we’re getting more comfortable with one another,” Antetokounmpo said. “We’re not letting guys off the hook when we play, me and him.”

“It’s a lot more natural as far as I’m seeing it and feeling it,” Lillard said Thursday about their chemistry. “Last year everybody was like oh they got to play two-man, you got to do this and in practice it was so scripted all the time.

“Just time, reps and us just getting to know each other, now we’re just having a lot of communication among the two of us, without Doc or without anybody else. And talking about what I want him to do, what I see. And he’ll tell me what he’s trying to do, what he sees.”

Defensively, teams are attacking Lillard, exacerbating the contrast between him and Jrue Holiday, the player Milwaukee traded to acquire Lillard — and who ended up helping Boston win a title last season. Opponents are forcing Lillard to defend an average of 11.3 on-ball screens per 100 possessions — up from 7.0 last season and by far his highest rate since tracking began in 2013-14, according to ESPN Research — and having success in doing so. In each of the first seven games, the Bucks allowed an opposing guard to score at least 25 points against them. And they are getting cooked in transition, ranking 28th in points per possession allowed in transition, ahead of the Lakers and the Spurs.

But the Bucks have little choice than to hope the Antetokounmpo-Lillard pairing starts to pay dividends, because the cost of contending for the past seven years has left Milwaukee without options.

The only first-round pick the Bucks have available to trade is in 2031 and they have one second-round pick available. The 2025 pick they owe to either New Orleans or Brooklyn this season was a part of a trade to acquire Holiday in 2020.

Because they are over the second apron, the Bucks aren’t allowed to take back more salary in a trade or aggregate contracts sent out. They also aren’t allowed to sign a player waived during the season who had a salary greater than $12.8 million before being waived.

With the second-apron restrictions in place, the team tried to do the best it could this summer in adding veterans willing to take minimum salaries to play for a potential contender, but those moves haven’t paid off. Trent is shooting 23% from 3, the worst mark of his career. Wright has scored just 15 points in limited action. Prince has been one of the lone bright spots, shooting 55% overall and from 3, blowing away his previous career high of 40%.

The returning supporting cast hasn’t been much better. Bobby Portis is averaging his lowest scoring total in four seasons with the Bucks and shooting a career-worst 29% from 3, while both Brook Lopez and Pat Connaughton are shooting 27% from deep.

Bucks role players were expected to help round out the roster, but ultimately the team was counting on the continuity of their star players to prevail.

“We know what we’re capable of,” Lillard told reporters Monday. “It’s just a matter of putting it together and we got a lot of games to do it. For that reason we’ve got every reason to keep fighting because we’re going to find our way back and be looking back at this at some point. You can never be the team to fold.”

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MIDDLETON’S ABSENCE HAS loomed large for the Bucks to start the season.

He underwent surgery on both his ankles in the offseason, a left ankle surgery in May to fix an injury caused from landing on Kevin Durant’s foot during a game in February, and a right ankle surgery in June to fix an injury that occurred during the first round of the playoffs in April. At the start of training camp, Rivers had been optimistic about Middleton’s chances to start the season on time, but for weeks he and the team have avoided linking themselves to any timeline for his return.

Middleton, 33, has played in just 88 games since the start of the 2022-23 season. But his performance during last year’s playoffs, 24.7 points on 48% shooting, showed he can still be effective when healthy.

When the Bucks had Antetokounmpo, Lillard and Middleton share the floor last season, they had a plus-17.5 net efficiency, the second best among trios to play at least 600 minutes together. However, under Rivers, the trio has rarely been healthy at the same time. They played in just five games together after the All-Star break and none in the playoffs.

Middleton participated in a 3-on-3 scrimmage Thursday, the first time he’s done so since training camp. The team hopes he can start playing in 5-on-5 scrimmages soon before he’s ready to return to games.

“I haven’t coached him much at all. I had him in the playoffs, but other than that, not a lot of games,” Rivers said. “But I know he can play. I know how good he is, but right now that’s not the focus for me. I’m more focused on what we have and who’s playing right now.”

Rivers made a lineup switch before Thursday’s game against the Jazz, inserting second-year wing Andre Jackson Jr. into the starting lineup to replace the struggling Trent. Jackson began the year out of the rotation, playing one minute of garbage time in the first two games combined, but on Thursday he played a season-high 28 minutes. A.J. Green, a sharpshooting 25-year-old who signed with the team a few years ago on a two-way deal as an undrafted free agent, logged 18 minutes off the bench and knocked down 4 of his 6 3-pointers. Increasing playing time has been Rivers’ chance to inject youth into the rotation for one of the oldest rosters in the NBA.

Their presence helped the Bucks capitalize on a combined 65 points from Lillard and Antetokounmpo en route to a victory over the Jazz.

“Every good team has somebody that you can point to that’s a disruptor,” Lillard said after Thursday’s win. “A lot of those hustle plays that can bring energy to a team, but also those moments where it looks like the other team is about to have something happen for him and then [Jackson’s] energy, effort and his motor comes into play for us.”

That game was the first in a five-games-in-seven-night stretch, which includes a visit to New York Friday night and a home game against the defending champion Celtics on Sunday. The schedule begins to ease after that with games against the Raptors, Pistons and Hornets, but the Bucks know they need to start piling up wins to deliver on Rivers’ promise of a playoff berth. Despite the slow start, ESPN Analytics’ Basketball Power Index still gives Milwaukee a 65% chance of reaching the playoffs.

“There’s anxiety always because you don’t like losing,” Rivers said before his team snapped their losing streak Thursday. “There’s also a more calm state when you’re a team that knows that you can be a good team. You know you’re going to get it going. Sometimes that can be fool’s gold too because you just assume that instead of going to do something about it. Hopefully we’re not the latter.”