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TORONTO — No one expected the league’s worst offense to put up 130 points against one of the league’s preseason title favorites. Nor would anyone have predicted Khris Middleton, who’s on a minutes limit, spending more time on the floor than starting center Brook Lopez. Nor could anyone imagine Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard, in the first week of the season, spending their postgame media sessions in Toronto discussing the team’s struggles to figure out their chemistry.
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But yet, all of that happened on Wednesday night.
So, following a 130-111 loss to the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday night, Milwaukee Bucks head coach Adrian Griffin needed a deep breath and three extra seconds to collect his thoughts before commenting on his team’s defensive performance.
“I didn’t think we did a good job as far as keeping the ball in front,” Griffin said. “Too many points in the paint. As far as kick-out 3s, they were driving and spraying it around. Just containing penetration and then just having the discipline to sit down and guard, I thought it was too many straight line drives in the paint and they were just spraying it around.
“And then, we were closing short to all of their players tonight and partly on us as a staff, so I take blame for that. Just gotta do a better job at preparing them on a nightly basis.”
Griffin’s disappointment was clear and understandable.
Entering Wednesday’s game, the Raptors had posted the league’s worst offensive rating in the first week of the 2023-24 season, scoring just 100.8 points per 100 possessions, according to NBA.com.
In the first two minutes, the Raptors lived up to their early season reputation, committing turnovers on four of their first five possessions. The Bucks similarly squandered their early opportunities, though and watched as the Raptors, a team that had made just 33.3 percent of their 3-pointers in their first four games (tied for 21st in the NBA before the game) nailed their first three 3-point shots. They then proceeded to slice apart the Bucks’ defense with dunks and lay-ups.
Griffin called his first timeout of the night with 8:36 remaining in the first quarter and the Raptors leading, 11-4, following a dunk from Jakob Poeltl in which the Raptors’ big man got lost underneath the basket following multiple offensive rebounds. Less than four minutes later, Griffin called his second timeout following back-to-back possessions where Poeltl scored easy buckets to give the Raptors a 22-8 lead with 4:47 left in the first quarter.
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The first of those back-to-back buckets came on a possession where, as Griffin described in his post-game answer, starting shooting guard Malik Beasley failed to stay in front of Dennis Schröder. Once the Raptors point guard got past Beasley, Lopez needed to help and Schröder pitched a short pass behind his head for a dunk from Poeltl.
On the very next possession, Lillard got himself caught behind Schröder and never caught up, which forced Lopez to help and then attempt to recover as Poeltl glided to the rim for an easy two.
On both plays, the Bucks guard that had missed a shot on the preceding offensive possession tried to pick up Schröder in the backcourt. Neither found their way back in front of the Raptors point guard to slow down the drive at the point of attack, which compromised the Bucks’ defensive structure.
While the Bucks’ struggles at the point of attack were the first thing Griffin highlighted during his post-game media session, it was far from the only problem his team had defensively on Wednesday night.
Through three games, the Bucks were the league’s worst transition defense in the NBA, giving up 1.58 points per play off live rebounds, according to Cleaning the Glass. That trend continued in Toronto. The Bucks failed to get back following a missed 3-pointer from MarJon Beauchamp, a mistake inspired Griffin to call his fourth timeout in the first half.
And while it has not appeared in all four games this season, the Bucks struggled to control the defensive glass against the Raptors on Wednesday, just like they struggled to finish defensive possessions with a rebound in their 127-110 loss to the Atlanta Hawks. On Sunday, the Hawks grabbed 39 percent of their misses. Toronto grabbed 41 percent of theirs on Wednesday.
“The Raptors, over the last few years, they’ve always been one or two in offensive rebounds, they’re built for that,” Griffin said. “It was something that we were expecting, we just didn’t execute it. This game comes down to fundamentals and boxing out and we had some momentum at times, but we failed to retrieve some of those long rebounds. And that gave them second chance opportunities, kind of stalled our comeback, if you will.”
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Eventually, the Bucks’ repeated defensive lapses led to a 66-44 halftime deficit and a game that somehow felt out of reach against a team that had failed to score at least 100 points in two of their first four regular season games.
Somehow, things only got stranger in the second half.
Khris Middleton, who was expected to once again be on a minutes limit, did not start the third quarter after playing 13 minutes in the first half. While Jae Crowder started in his place, Middleton came back 92 seconds into the second half for Lopez. Middleton ended up playing another four and a half minutes on the night, but Lopez did not see the floor again until the 8:55 mark of the fourth quarter.
When asked about the unusual lineup decision, Griffin explained that he was under the impression that Middleton had already played his allotted minutes limit for the night as the team took the floor out of halftime.
“I thought Khris was done, but he wasn’t,” Griffin said. “So when I found out he wasn’t, I put Khris in and then tried to go small. That’s all it was. Brook didn’t do anything wrong, but I thought initially Khris was done with his minutes. But he had a few more, so I wanted to throw him back in there.”
While Griffin said Lopez did not do anything wrong, the Bucks decided to play without their biggest player on the floor for nearly 16 minutes while the team was surrendering offensive rebounds at an incredibly high rate. Ultimately, no matter the reason, Griffin opted to play the reigning runner-up to Defensive Player of the Year just 17 minutes in the fourth game of the season to search for different options defensively.
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And that is only a detailed breakdown of the Bucks’ defensive problems on Wednesday night. Offensively, the Bucks managed just 44 points in the first half.
In 31 minutes, Lillard took only nine shots and finished the night with 15 points and six assists. It was only the 16th time in Lillard’s 773 career games in which he took fewer than 10 shots in a game.
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“To me, you just take what the defense gives you,” Griffin said of Lillard’s low shot total. “They’re going to put two, three people on him, somebody’s going to shoot an open three. And when we did that we got opens shots. Beasley, he knocked own a couple wide open (shots) because swing-swing, open 3.
“Sometimes it may not be your night as far as shot attempts, but finding different ways to be a playmaker and make the team pay for putting multiple bodies on Giannis and Dame. And I have to do a better job with that. But it’s still early and those guys are doing the best they can to try to figure out each other’s strengths and play with each other. And it’ll come with time.”
While both Antetokounmpo and Lillard were open about the growing pains they expected the Bucks to go through at the start of this season, the realities of those struggles have been tougher to live through than the statements they gave before the season began. And both players reflected on what that has meant for them in the first week of the season.
“The hard part is just staying patient,” Lillard said. “I think we’ve all been around long enough to understand that it’s a process and it’s going to take time, but I don’t think that makes it any easier. When it’s happening, you’re kinda like, ‘Man.’ I know I said it’s a process and I know it’s going to take time but we’re competitors and we’ve done this at a high level, so we expect to get the kind of results that we put into it.
“It’s going to look ugly sometimes and other times it’s going to look like the potential that it’s supposed to look like. We had a solid, solid showing opening night and then we laid an egg kind of against Atlanta. Then we bounced back, and tonight, it was the same thing. So I think you know you’re in that type of process when you have that type of inconsistency.”
“But none of us are looking at it like oh, it’s OK. Obviously it’s frustrating. We don’t want to have it, but we’re still trying to learn each other, we’re still trying to learn a new staff. It’s one thing to understand it in walk-throughs and in practice but to go out there when another team is team is trying to disrupt it and to be able to make reads and understand within that, it’s a different challenge.”
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In Antetokounmpo’s mind, it is important that the Bucks remain patient, but he fears that patience could turn into the team believing that all they have to do is show up and the process will unfold naturally without any extra effort or work.
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“It’s a struggle,” Antetokounmpo said. “OK, we can make excuses — there’s a new player, there’s a new coach, there’s a new system — we can keep on making excuses and think that it’s going to be OK, but that doesn’t work in life. That doesn’t work like that. You have to figure out solutions and right now our solution is that, ‘Oh, we have a new player and a new coach’, and ‘Oh, we’re going to be better in Game 40.’
“No. We have to get better. We have to play together. We have to be more clear on what we try to get from offense. We have to be more clear in what we’re trying to accomplish defensively and who we are going to let attack us, because you’ve got to live with something. You cannot stop everything. We gotta keep figuring out solutions. Right now, we’re not there yet. Hopefully we can get better in the future. But if we just stay with the mindset that we are going to get better in the future, we will not. We have to every day come to the court and figure out ways to get better. I believe that as a team we will get better, hopefully.”
As Lillard reflected on what he has tried to do in the first four games of the season, he found that he believes he has been doing the work that Antetokounmpo described by not just taking over himself or putting his head down to do what he used to do when he was the lone star on his team in Portland.
“Typically for me, I take charge, and I try to make things happen and do more,” Lillard said. “But I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I want to accept the process of this happening. And you know, Giannis is probably feeling the same way and Khris is probably feeling the same way. We want to show trust and not just go back to something that’s not sustainable. And I think because of that sometimes it can get ugly.
“And sometimes, just in my experience in the league, it gets a little bit ugly out there when everybody’s trying to do the right thing and nobody wants to do the wrong thing. I think that’s kind of happening.”
In Antetokounmpo’s mind though, that selflessness might ultimately be a detriment to the process, as it doesn’t allow anyone to showcase the skills that make them special players in the first place.
“I feel like a lot of people are trying to do the right thing, and sometimes it’s gotta be somebody that gonna have to start the spark and do something that other people can follow,” Antetokounmpo said. “At times, some guys did that tonight but wasn’t able to follow up with it.”
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“When offensively we got some easy looks and some easy buckets, defensively we wasn’t able to stop them. So again, at times, I think sometimes guys gotta step up and impose their will so other people can follow and kind of build energy and start something going.”
So what comes next? How do the Bucks keep moving forward in this process?
Antetokounmpo believes the Bucks need to talk to each other and not just offer blind encouragement, but rather critical conversations that address the team’s issues and how to improve them.
“Player to player. Coaches to coaches. Players to coaches. Every single conversation, everything helps. Everybody,” Antetokounmpo said. “And you’ve got to have tough conversations too. Because some things don’t work and sometimes players make wrong plays and things that players think that work, it doesn’t work.
“So you got to have tough conversation between players to players, coaches to coaches, between players and coaches, coaches to players. You just have tough conversations. We got to keep that conversation going because if you just keep and turn to yourself and don’t speak your mind, it’s not going to work.“
It’s only been one week and the Bucks have only played four games together, but if Antetokounmpo has his way, it’s time for the conversation to begin.
(Photo of Giannis Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton and Scottie Barnes: Mark Blinch / NBAE via Getty Images)
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