MILWAUKEE — If the Milwaukee Bucks’ 113-107 loss to the defending champion Boston Celtics felt or looked familiar, you were not imagining things.
“We can’t sustain,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said on Sunday after his team dropped to 2-8. “The (Nov. 2) Cleveland game, we came out like gangbusters and as the game goes on, we just don’t sustain our play.
“The game plan against Cleveland was great coming out and we lost it. The game plan coming out tonight, again, was great and then we lose our way. And so it’s my job to try to make sure we keep going, keep playing, keep playing at the right pace. We didn’t do that.”
After racing out to an 11-point halftime lead, the Bucks offense was dormant in the second half. One sequence late in the fourth quarter encapsulated how much of the half went for the Bucks’ offense.
Facing a five-point deficit with three and a half minutes remaining, Bucks point guard Damian Lillard brought the ball up to get his team into one of the game’s most important possessions. After crossing half court, Lillard passed to Giannis Antetokounmpo in the middle outside the 3-point line. Antetokounmpo quickly passed to Brook Lopez, who had gotten position on Jayson Tatum around the left elbow. After passing to Lopez, Antetokounmpo went to screen for Lillard and Lopez waited for his point guard to get open.
And the Bucks’ big man waited.
And he waited.
For seven seconds, Lopez held the ball while Antetokounmpo screened for Lillard and then Lillard screened for Antetokounmpo.
With Lillard unable to free himself, Antetokounmpo came back to the ball and Lopez pitched it to him on a dribble handoff that Celtics wing Jayson Tatum jumped and poked away.
The ball rolled to the back court and AJ Green corralled it but the Bucks committed a shot clock violation on a possession that ended in the backcourt.
“I just thought, I don’t know, I thought we lost our pace,” Rivers said. “I called a timeout, I think, on the second play (of the third quarter) because you could see it, we came out flat. That happens. I don’t know why. I wish we all knew why. And they took advantage of it.”
The Bucks came out of the gate strong on Sunday, racing out to a 16-2 lead behind some hot 3-point shooting. That quick start catapulted Milwaukee to a 40-point first quarter and eventually a 69-58 lead after two quarters. In the first half, the Bucks moved the ball well and played with exceptional half-court pace by moving from one action to the next in rapid succession.
Look at this quick catch and pass by Lopez on the short roll:
And watch how quickly Antetokounmpo and Lillard flowed into this two-man action:
In the first half, the Bucks played with pace. Antetokounmpo had a big night with 43 points, 13 rebounds, five assists and two blocks on Sunday, but he tallied 27 of those points on 12-of-16 shooting in the first two quarters.
In the second half, the Celtics ground down the Bucks’ offense to a halt with their hard-nosed switching defense.
“I thought we were the aggressor for two quarters and then they were very aggressive in the third quarter,” Rivers said. “I will say I thought we got it back in the fourth, but we really never played well like we played again. We scored, but I thought they were the far more aggressive team from the third, the fourth quarter, and we were aggressive in the first two. And that bothered me, especially how we came out.”
While the Celtics started the game with Al Horford covering Antetokounmpo, they put former Buck Jrue Holiday on Antetokounmpo in the second half and shifted Horford to an off-ball helper who was often covering the Bucks’ fourth or fifth offensive option. With Holiday on Antetokounmpo, Jaylen Brown on Lillard and Tatum on Lopez, Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla had three big, switchable defenders on the three players the Bucks wanted to use most in their offensive actions.
And the Bucks never found their way.
The Celtics’ defensive savvy showed itself most against Lillard, who never found a rhythm, putting up 14 points on 4-of-15 shooting, four rebounds and six assists. The Celtics used Brown on Lillard to bother the Bucks point guard with his length and if Lillard was ever able to shake free from Brown, the Celtics would switch someone else onto him to prevent Lillard from getting the ball.
“They did a great job on him,” Rivers said. “Top locking him, denying him the ball, they switched on him a lot. And that’s where we gotta get better at getting to the next action to help Dame. I didn’t think we helped Dame enough today.”
With Lillard blanketed, the Bucks struggled to figure out how to involve him offensively. Far too many of their second-half possessions looked like the clutch-time possession where Lopez held the ball for seven seconds with nothing else happening.
“I don’t think it was so much them stopping me from getting it back,” Lillard said. “Sometimes, when I was just on the weak side of the action, my guy had his back to the play, he was just kind of face guarding me. Basically, it was almost like four-on-four in some situations.”
The Bucks were unable to take advantage of those four-on-four situations. Watch what happens after Lillard gives up the ball on this fourth quarter possession and cuts to the right corner:
The Celtics have played together for a year and know how to effectively switch with relative ease, but this isn’t only about the Celtics being a good defensive team. The Bucks did not seem to have a real plan once Lillard gave up the ball, other than trying to give the ball back to Lillard.
“Like Doc said, I just think we gotta have a plan for that, so not only I know what the next thing to do is, but we are all connected in it, so it’s not just me running around just because,” Lillard said. “When it happens, I (should) know what I’m what I’m doing to free myself and to come back to the ball or come back to the action and everybody else (should) as well.”
Bucks general manager Jon Horst built this team to be a three-headed offensive monster late in games, but with Khris Middleton still sidelined, Antetokounmpo and Lillard are the lone creators. In the first 10 games of the season, both players have found individual success and put up big numbers, but the Bucks have lacked the necessary connectivity with the other players on the floor to build an elite offense around their superstar duo.
Often, it has felt as if the Bucks have not been organized in the moments teams have taken Antetokounmpo and Lillard from working with each other. Against the Celtics, that lack of offensive connectivity manifested itself in those stalled second-half possessions.
“It’s kind of hard,” Antetokounmpo said. “Dame is our primary ballhandler. You want to get the ball back to Dame, but times where they deny, we gotta figure out other actions. We gotta play to a different side. We did it at times, but down the stretch, we’re so locked in sometimes to just give the ball back to Dame, so we just kind of wait for him to make a move or open up.
“I think it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time. We’ve won many games that we wait for him to open up and give him back the ball to make a play and make something happen for us or himself.”
After 10 games, the Bucks have lost eight of them, an unimaginable position for a team that spent the preseason talking about championship aspirations.
This season, the Bucks have lost two games to the defending champions already and will see them again in Boston on Dec. 6. The Bucks have 11 games before that match-up and eight of those 11 take place in Fiserv Forum. Nine games come against Eastern Conference teams with winning percentages below .500 as of Sunday night. The Bucks have a real chance to salvage their early-season record in these 11 games, but it will require them consistently playing with focus and effort against teams that are not seen as elite.
“We just gotta understand what we’re doing when we’re having success against the best teams,” Lillard said on Sunday. “Because when we do those things, we have success against the teams that aren’t the best teams as well. So we just got to know that this is what makes us the best version of ourselves and we’ve got to be able to do it regardless of who we playing. And we got to be able to do it for longer periods of time. And we’ll have success when we do those things.”
Because if they don’t play with focus, effort and execution consistently over the next month, their season may already be lost by the time they get to Boston in early December.
(Photo of Jaylen Brown and Giannis Antetokounmpo: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
